The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2014

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2014.

This year AITO has two Senior Prize winners who each is awarded the Senior Prize.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Robert France for his research on adding formal semantics to object-oriented modeling notations.

The Senior Prize is awarded to William Cook for his contributions to the theory and practice of object-oriented programming.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Tudor Gîrba for his work on modeling and visualization of evolution and interplay of large numbers of objects.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2014 will be given during ECOOP 2014 in Uppsala, Sweden, in July/August 2014.

William R. Cook is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, UT Austin, who has made lasting contributions to the theory and practice of object-oriented programming. His PhD thesis specified the semantics of inheritance in a way that is now a point of reference, and his later papers introduced or developed several well-known concepts such as interfaces, F-bounded polymorphism, class hierarchy refactoring, and the expression problem. Working in industry for about twelve years, he was the primary language designer of AppleScript, and he founded the start-up Allegis, a company that grew to a 150 employees, with customers including Microsoft and HP. Returning to academia, he has worked on the integration of databases and programming languages, on new mechanisms for remote execution, and on advanced modularity techniques. His recent work includes the languages Orc and Ensō, using executable specification languages, interpreter composition, and partial evaluation to provide an extremely flexible self-describing DSL workbench. Finally, he has contributed to the community in numerous ways, including many program committee tasks, and as the general chair of SPLASH 2010. Robert France is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Colorado State University, who is a pioneer in adding formal semantics to object-oriented modeling notations. He has worked on making object-oriented models amenable to analysis by integrating formal and informal object modeling notations, and it was his visionary work on these topics in the early 1990s that led to the formation of the pUML (Precise UML group). He was central to the formation of pUML and its activities. This initial vision not only spawned a range of publications from Professor France and his collaborators but a wide range of second and third generation papers. Therefore, what started as an initial seed from a doctoral dissertation, nurtured by a vision of adding precision to UML and object-oriented modeling, has blossomed to standard practice and branched into a number of related areas such as model transformations, general formalization frameworks, model evolution and model reasoning techniques. Professor France remains highly active in leading further initiatives including: GEM OC, an international effort to develop techniques, frameworks, and environments to facilitate the creation, integration, and automated processing of heterogeneous modeling languages; and ReMODD: a community repository for model-based development. He has served on program committees of major conferences such as UML/MODELS, AOSD, OOPSLA, FMOODS and ICST. He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of the journal Software and Systems Modeling (SoSym), and was the Software Area editor for IEEE Computer and associate editor for the Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability. Tudor Gîrba is one of the new generation of European computer scientists. He moved from his native Romania to finish a PhD in 2005 with Stéphane Ducasse and Oscar Nierstrasz at the Software Composition Group in Bern, Switzerland. He was instrumental in moving SCG's flagship framework ("Moose") from an academic to an industrial setting. Tudor is a first class modeler with high quality research in information and software visualization. His work on "Mondrian", based on a Master's thesis that he supervised, rapidly became the visualization tool of choice in the Smalltalk community. He is also a builder of communities. For instance, he has been central to efforts related to scripting tools and domain specific languages. He is extremely active in bridging the gap between academia and industry, and in doing so, he has been a promotor of innovation. This has not been a barrier to Tudor Gîrba from being a first-class researcher, as witnessed by his more conventional academic production. But above all, he is someone with a vision, with a broad research interest that made him cross paths with ECOOP and similar venues. Those who know him will confirm that he has a larger-than-life personality that cannot but launch him into a remarkable career as a computer scientist. Tudor Gîrba's work is soundly rooted in object orientation. The originality of his bringing modeling and visualization to the evolution and interplay of large numbers of objects is the prime justification for awarding him the junior Dahl-Nygaard prize.

The Members of the 2014 Dahl-Nygaard Award Committee were: Walter Cazzola, Awais Rashid (Chairman), Erik Ernst, James Noble, and Theo D'Hondt.

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. As of March 2014, 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.