The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winner for 2009

AITO is very proud to announce the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2009. The Senior Prize will be given to David Ungar, IBM Research. No Junior award will be given in 2009.

David Ungar's work on Self has had a profound effect on the field, by introducing the advanced adaptive compilation technology that made the widespread industrial use of Java possible. David has also made major contributions in other key implementation areas such as generational garbage collection. Self's use of prototypes also inspired the design of Javascript, and thus the programming experience of millions. The technologies introduced in Self have only been partially realized, and we can expect further impact in the coming years.

The members of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes 2009 Nomination Committee were: Arne Maus (Chair), Gerti Kappel, Oscar Nierstrasz, Zoltán Horváth and Denis Caromel.

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 36 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul. For further information, visit www.aito.org or contact Eric Jul, eric@diku.dk.