The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2012

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2012.

The Senior Prize winner is Gregor Kiczales, University of British Columbia, Canada, for his work on CLOS and the MOP and for spearheading aspect-orientation and AspectJ.

The Junior Prize winner is Tobias Wrigstad, University of Uppsala, Sweden, for his work on ownership types, 'like' types, and Thorn.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2012 were given during ECOOP 2012 in Beijing, China in June 2012.

Gregor Kiczales is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Gregor started his career as a research staff member at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in 1980, and went on to work for Atari Corporate Research and Symbolics Cambridge Research Center in the 1980s, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a manager and principal scientist until 2002, when he became a professor at UBC. While at PARC he wrote the inspirational book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol with Jim Des Rivieres and Daniel G. Bobrow as part of a substantial effort contributing to the development of the Common Lisp Object System. Starting with the ECOOP 1997 keynote and associated paper on Aspect-Oriented Programming (with over 6,400 citations), he stood out as a leading figure in the creation of the new aspect-orientation community, and inspired numerous other researchers to come up with novel responses to the many challenges associated with modularity and, in particular, cross cutting concerns and the tangling that they imply. His work on the language AspectJ also established him as a natural point of reference in this community and beyond, both in terms of research contributions, practical implementations, and care for the user community.

Tobias Wrigstad is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He received his PhD degree from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in 2006, and went on to be a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University, and is now at Uppsala University. Tobias Wrigstad has been a very active researcher in areas of programming language design that involve the interplay between types and topics that are not typically included under that heading. In particular, he has contributed substantially to many papers about ownership types, he has worked on a variant of virtual types in connection with the language Tribe, and recently in 'Integrating typed and untyped code in a scripting language', POPL 2010, he helped creating the foundation for a new intermediate form between static and dynamic typing, which is used in the language Thorn. Tobias Wrigstad is also a highly active contributor to the community, having served on more than a dozen program committees including ECOOP, POPL, and OOPSLA, having co-organized many workshops and several student related activities at major conferences, and being a member of several steering committees.

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 39 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul. For further information, visit www.aito.org.