The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2019

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2019.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Laurie Hendren.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Ilya Sergey.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2019 will be given during ECOOP 2019 in London, UK, in July 2019.

Laurie Hendren Dr. Hendren has been making continuous and significant contributions for the past 30+ years to the field of object-oriented programming languages and compilation. She has developed technologies and tools underlying the implementation of a range of programming languages: (a) accurate and efficient points-to analysis for C, C++ and Java (SABLE and SOOT), (b) analysis, compilation and optimizing Java bytecode in her customizable, extensible Java compilation framework, (c) exploring analyses and language extensions for the premier aspect-oriented language AspectJ, (abc or Aspect Bench Compiler), and (d) easily extensible compilation for MATLAB and VM tools for scientific and data analytics languages (McLAB).

Her tools have impressive numbers of external users, eg 18 courses and 61 distinct research projects are usig SOOT. Her work on MATLAB allows standard MATLAB code, to be compiled efficiently into standard scientific languages such as Fortran & C, parallel codes (X10), dynamic languages (JavaScript) or GPU-based codes (OpenCL). Her work has been ground-breaking in building a compiler infrastructure with various target languages and architectures. Her group showed that using JavaScript for numerical computation actually offered a 2-3 times speedup performance over C code as written for such applications. Her work on X10 explored compilation targeting new parallel architectures and groups of GPUs.

Recently and over the past 3 years, in collaboration with medical researchers at the McGill University Heath Center, while leading a team of ~30 undergraduate researchers she developed the Opal mobile app. This app provides just-in-time, personally specialized, data and educational information to cancer patients.

Ilya Sergey Ilya Sergey has made a number of significant contributions in the development and application of programming language techniques to various problems across the programming spectrum, covering object-oriented , functional, distributed, and concurrent programming, as well as the blockchain and smart contracts.

He developed novel reduction semantics for layer-based context-oriented programming, and designed and implemented a notion of gradual types for ownership types. He applied abstract interpretation to graph algorithms, and the analysis of higher-order programs. He developed a randomized testing framework for computational geometry algorithms. He has developed and applied separation logics for the verification of distributed and fine-grained concurrent object-oriented programs and data structures, non-linearizable concurrent objects, the verification of distributed protocols, static race detection, and program synthesis. More recent work applies the ideas of concurrent-object verification to reasoning about smart contracts, Ethereum Bytecode, and blockchain consensus. He designed and co-developed Scilla, a programming language for safe and secure smart contracts, and serves as advisor to Zilliqa.

Ilya mechanises most of his proofs in Coq, and he has given a week-long Coq tutorial at summer schools. He has been on the PC of several high-profile conferences, and his reviews are highly informative. He is a contributor to numerous open source projects. He demonstrates a heathy openeness and curiosity for many diverse research questions.

The Members of the 2019 Dahl-Nygaard Award Committee are:

• Sophia Drossopoulou (chair)

• Camil Demetrescu

• Erik Ernst

• Peter Müller

• Tijs van der Storm

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.