2023 Winners

The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2023

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2023.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Sophia Drossopoulou.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Heather Miller.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2023 will be given during ECOOP 2023 held in held in Seattle, USA, July 17-21 2023.


Sophia Drossopoulou

Sophia’s research contributions are wide-ranging and fundamental to a number of aspects of Programming Languages; she has contributed to advances in the theoretical underpinnings of mainstream language paradigms and has worked with a number of industry partners on new language designs. Her contributions started with the ECOOP paper,  “Java is Type Safe Probably”, which she wrote with her long-term collaborator Susan Eisenbach. The paper was the first attempt to come to judgment about the type-safety of Java; it served as a guide for generations of young researchers learning to write type systems for object-oriented languages. She followed this up with additional inquiries into Java: binary compatibility, linking and loading, and later, a formalisation of wildcards. She branched out into topics including dynamic object reclassification, type inference for dynamic languages, ownership types, and capability systems. Last but in no way least, Sophia contributed to the quality of many conferences by turning monologues into dialogues. To many in our community, she is a role model and mentor.


Heather Miller

Heather has made significant contributions to the Scala language, community and ecosystem, through her research, community organizing and teaching. In her research, she made contributions to distributed programming with objects with her work on spores, concurrency, asynchrony, CRDTs, and functional programming in a big-data setting. In her community role, Heather was the co-founder and Executive Director of the Scala Center where she directed development of the language and libraries as well as set standards for the community process. As an educator, she designed and led a series of massive on-line classes on Scala, Spark and Big Data. Over 100,000 students have followed her curriculum.


The Members of the 2023 Dahl-Nygaard Award Committee are:

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 2021, it has 59 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul.