The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2025

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2025.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Mira Mezini.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Amir Shaikhha.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2025 will be given during ECOOP 2025 held in held in Bergen, Norway, 30 June – 4 July 2025.

Mira Mezini (TU Darmstadt)

Over the last 30 years, Mira Mezini has made outstanding contributions in the fields of Programming Languages and Software Engineering, on a diverse range of topics including modularization, software product lines, distributed programming, static analysis, type systems and automatic differentiation, to name but a few. Prof. Mezini is particularly well known for her pioneering work on aspect-oriented programming and has solved important open problems related to the interplay between aspect orientation and module systems. Prof. Mezini also led breakthrough work on automated code completion, providing an early use of data mining to allow code completion to go beyond recommendations purely based on static type information, leading to techniques that have been adopted in the world’s most widely used integrated development environments.

The Members of the 2025 Dahl-Nygaard Senior Award Committee are:

• •  Alastair Donaldson (chair)

  •  James Noble

  •  Bruno Oliviera

  •  Emma Söderberg

Amir Shaikhha (University of Edinburgh)

Amir Shaikhha is known for his pioneering interdisciplinary work, spanning programming language design, compiler construction, and data management for AI and machine learning. His work is deeply grounded in theoretical foundations and has already made a substantial impact on both the PL and database communities. His early career achievements are exceptional: his PhD thesis, which received both a Google award and a thesis distinction award, set a remarkably high standard from the outset. His consistent record of high-quality publications in the most prestigious PL and database venues (including ECOOP)

further attests to his research independence. His work has also garnered best paper, most reproducible, and most influential paper awards as well as best reviewer awards.

The Members of the 2025 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Award Committee are:

• Klaus Ostermann (chair)

•  Alastair Donaldson (vice-chair)

•  James Noble

•  Bruno Oliviera

•  Emma Söderberg

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 Davide Ancona.