The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2011

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2011 were given during ECOOP 2011 in Lancaster, UK. The Senior Prize was given to Craig Chambers, Google, for the design of the Cecil object-oriented programming language and his work on compiler techniques used to implement object-oriented languages efficiently on modern architectures. The Junior Prize was given to Atsushi Igarashi, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, for his investigations into the foundation of object-oriented programming languages and their type systems.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes 2011 were presented in July at ECOOP 2011, in Lancaster, UK.

The members of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes 2011 Nomination Committee were: Jan Vitek (Chair), Sophia Drossopoulou, Mira Mezini, Erik Ernst and Theo D'Hondt.

Craig Chambers, Google, Seattle, WA. Craig started his career working on the Argus project at MIT and then continued with a Ph.D. from Stanford on the implementation of the Self programming language. From 1992 to 2007, he was a faculty member at the University of Washington where he designed two new object-oriented languages, Cecil and Diesel, with flexible method dispatching models and novel modularity mechanisms. He led the development of the Vortex whole-program optimizing compiler infrastructure that supported efficient implementation of object-oriented languages like Cecil, Java, Smalltalk, and C++. Craig published numerous papers in the proceedings of conferences such as ECOOP, OOPSLA, PLDI and POPL, including three award papers at PLDI in 1989, 1995 and 1999. His most widely cited paper, titled "Optimization of Object-Oriented Programs Using Static Class Hierarchy Analysis", appeared at ECOOP in 1995 and proposed exploiting the shape of the inheritance graph to optimize method dispatch. This idea became one of the most widely used implementation techniques for object-oriented languages.

Atsushi Igarashi is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University in Japan. The Dahl Nygaard committee recognizes that Atsushi made a seminal contribution to the foundations of object-oriented languages with his paper title "Featherweight Java: A minimal core calculus for Java and GJ", co-authored with Benjamin Pierce, and Philip Wadler. The paper addressed the issue of type soundness of Java generics. It also went far beyond that, in that it presented an elegant, succinct calculus, called FJ, which captured the salient features of Java-based languages, and, since, served as the basis of innumerable studies of object-oriented features. Atsushi built on this work, to suggest models of other interesting features, such as inner classes and raw types. He has also worked on the design of object-oriented features, such as virtual classes, variant parametric types (an antecedent of Java wildcards), family polymorphism, and simple dependent types. His wider interests include concurrency and distribution, the pi-calculus and type inference.

The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prizes are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, two pioneers in the area of programming and simulation. Their foundational work on object-oriented programming, made concrete in the Simula language, is one of the most important inventions in software engineering. Their key ideas were expressed already around 1965, but took over 20 years to be absorbed and appreciated by the broader software community. After that, object-orientation has profoundly transformed the landscape of software design and development techniques. It was a great loss to our community that both Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard passed away in 2002. In remembrance of their scholarship and enthusiastic encouragement of young researchers, in 2004 AITO established a prize to be awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential for following in the footsteps of these two pioneers.

AITO (Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of object technology. Currently, it has 36 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul. For further information, visit www.aito.org.