The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2018

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2018.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Lars Bak.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Guoqing Harry Xu.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2018 will be given during ECOOP 2018 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in July 2018.

Lars Bak has done pioneering work in pointer-safe object-orientation. He was the lead implementor for a series of notable object-oriented systems: Beta, Self, Strongtalk, Java Hotspot, Resilient Smalltalk, and V8 Javascript. Few have done more than him to make object-orientation a significant factor in the wider world.

Guoqing Harry Xu has made significant contributions to different aspects of object-orientation due to a unique combination of technical strength and ambition to deliver effective object-oriented programming technologies for big data systems. The sheer amount of his practically-useful research is impressive.

The Members of the 2018 Dahl-Nygaard Award Committee were:

• Camil Demetrescu (chair)

• Sophia Drossopoulou

• Erik Ernst

• Peter Müller

• Frank Tip

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 January 2015, it has 46 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul. For further information, visit www.aito.org.