The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2013

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2013.

The Senior Prize winner is Oscar Nierstrasz, University of Bern, Switzerland, for his extensive and diverse contributions to research aimed at making systems more flexible with respect to changing requirements, based on programming languages and mechanisms supporting software evolution as well as tools and environments for reverse engineering and reengineering of complex software systems. On top of this, he also made valuable contributions to the research publication process, e.g., through "Identify the Champion", and to the new generations of researchers through top-level supervision.

The Junior Prize winner is Matthew Parkinson, Microsoft Research Cambridge, for his work on specifying and reasoning about object-oriented programs. He has introduced the notion of abstract predicates, providing a novel approach to longstanding problems in modular reasoning about object-oriented programs. He also argued that we should depart from the long-established class invariant concept, providing a novel approach which could conceivably impact the way that OO programming is understood in the future.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2013 will be given during ECOOP 2013 in Montpellier, France in July 2013.

Oscar Nierstrasz was born in the Netherlands, but grew up in Ontario, Canada. He completed his B.Math at the University of Waterloo in 1979 and his M.Sc. in 1981 and his Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of Toronto, in the area of Office Information Systems. He worked at the FORTH Institute of Computer Science in Crete for one year (1985), and has lived since then in Switzerland. He was a member of the Object Systems Group at the Centre Universitaire d'Informatique of the University of Geneva, Switzerland (1985-1994) before coming to Bern. Prof. Nierstrasz has been active in the international object-oriented research community. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Object Technology, he has served on the program committees of the ECOOP, OOPSLA, ESEC and many other conferences, and as the Program Chair of ECOOP '93, ESEC/FSE '99 and MoDELS '06. He has served several times as president and vice-president of CHOOSE, the subgroup on object-oriented systems and environments of the Swiss Informatics Society. He has also served as Vice-President of AITO.

Matthew Parkinson is a Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He received his PhD degree from the University of Cambridge in UK in 2005, and went on to be a postdoctoral researcher at Middlesex University, and then a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He joined Microsoft in 2010. Matthew Parkinson has been a very active researcher in the area of program verification for both concurrent and object oriented programs. He has significantly extended the application domain of separation logic. His recent work has focussed on generalizing separation logic with ideas from other concurrent methods such as rely-guarantee.

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 41 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul. For further information, visit www.aito.org.