The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2007

AITO is very proud to announce that the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2007 will be given to Luca Cardelli, Microsoft Research Cambridge (Senior prize) for his overall contribution to both theory and practice for object-oriented languages, and to Jonathan Aldrich, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh (Junior prize) for his recent contribution to expressing and verifying software architecture in object-oriented languages.

Luca Cardelli systematically developed typing theories for objects, from record types to bounded quantification, eventually leading to the famous book "A Theory of Objects", published with Martin Abadi in 1996. This masterpiece develops an "object calculus" as a foundation for object-oriented languages, in much the same way that Church's lambda-calculus is a foundation for procedural languages. Overall, Luca's work was inspired by strong expertise on language design, including functional languages and theory, such as ML, and object-oriented languages such as Modula-3. This leads Luca to further contribute to language design in the domain of mobility and locality with contributions such as Obliq and Ambient. The Ambient Calculus (developed with Andy Gordon) enables the formal analysis of mobile and wide-area systems, in part by taking advantage of a decade of previous work on process algebra. This work on mobility indirectly led to his recent interest in Systems Biology.

Jonathan Aldrich develops lightweight ways to statically assure architectural characteristics of large, real-world object-oriented systems. His pioneering thesis work on ArchJava (with advisors Craig Chambers and David Notkin) was the first system to verify at compile time that the dynamic structure of an object-oriented application conforms to an abstract, hierarchical software architecture. ArchJava, like Jonathan's other work, tackles head-on challenging aspects of object-oriented systems, including aliasing, reentrancy, inheritance, and the use of sophisticated design patterns. Jonathan's research is grounded in formal soundness proofs yet is validated through case study evaluations with realistic software systems and tasks. More recently, Jonathan and his students have made contributions in other aspects of object-oriented architecture assurance, including object protocol checking, modularity in aspect-oriented programming, and novel object models.

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, AITO established in 2004 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 pioneers.

The prizes will be awarded in July at ECOOP 2007, July 30 - August 03, Berlin, Germany. Luca Cardelli and Jonathan Aldrich have agreed to give keynotes talks. For details, see the conference program.