The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize - Statutes 2021

New revised version approved on October 2021

1. Annually, AITO awards the Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard prize to two individuals that have made significant technical contributions to the field of Object-Orientation. The work should be in the spirit of the pioneering conceptual and/or implementation work of Dahl and Nygaard, which shaped our present view of programming and modeling, now known as Object-Orientation.

2. The prize is presented by AITO each year at the ECOOP conference.

3. The prize consists of two awards: a Senior Prize given to a senior professional and a Junior Prize given to a junior professional. While the prizes are usually awarded annually, there may be exceptional occasions when one or both are left un-awarded at the discretion of the AITO Executive Committee, or even more than one prize in a category are awarded.

4. The senior professional should have made a significant long-term contribution to the field of Object-Orientation in research or engineering. The Senior Prize may be awarded to a group of professionals that, as a group, has made a significant technical contribution to the field.

5. The junior professional should be a recent PhD graduate that has made a promising contribution to the field through a paper, a thesis or a prototype implementation. No one can be a candidate for the junior prize, if his/her PhD graduation year dates back more than seven years¹ before the year in which the DN junior prize will be awarded, i.e., a candidate with a graduation year of 2000 is eligible for the junior prize up to and including 2007.

   1. The AITO General Assembly will annually appoint a Prize Award Committee consisting of a Chair, a Vice-Chair and two to four additional members. In addition, the AITO General Assembly appoints a ranked reserve list of up to five alternate members. In addition, the Chair and Vice-Chair of the past three years are thereafter added to the reserve list ranked most recent year first and Chair ranked higher than Vice-Chair. The Chair will solicit nominations for the Prizes.

   2. After nominations are received, the Chair shall declare any conflicts that any member of the Committee may have to the AITO Executive Board using the same criteria as for the ECOOP Programme Chair in the ECOOP Handbook. If there is one or more major conflicts, the conflicted members step aside and are replaced by another, non-conflicted, member from the ranked list of alternatives. If the resulting committee has less than four members, the AITO Executive Board appoints additional members until there are at least four members.

   3. If the Chair is conflicted, the Vice-Chair takes over as Chair. If both the Chair and the Vice-Chair are conflicted, the AITO Executive Board appoints a new Chair and Vice-Chair amongst the supplemented committee.

   4. Members of the AITO Executive Board cannot serve as the Award Chairs and may not be members of the Prize Award Committee.

6. Every year AITO and the Prize Nomination Committee solicits proposals for the following year until August 31st. Such notice shall be placed on the AITO/ECOOP websites and e-mailed to the ECOOP mailing list and other organizations such as appropriate.

7. Nominations may be submitted using a procedure decided by the AITO Executive Committee. Anyone can nominate anyone but themselves.

8. The Prize Nomination Committee can also consider nominations from the previous year.

9. The Prize Nomination Committee proposes candidates to the AITO Executive Committee no later than October 31st of the year preceding the award year.

10. The chair of the Nomination Committee attends the Executive Committee meeting where the proposals are discussed.

11. The AITO Executive decides the prize winners based on the proposals by December 15 th of the year preceding the award year.

12. Members of the Prize Nomination Committee and members of the AITO Executive Committee and persons that have been members of the AITO Executive within the past year ending January 15th of the award year, cannot be awarded a prize for the award year.

13. Conflicts of Interest rules are as for the ECOOP PC as described in the ECOOP Handbook.

14. The decision of the AITO Executive Committee is made public and official shortly after the decision has been made and thereafter published on the AITO web site.

15. The prizes will be officially presented at the ECOOP conference. The winners may be asked to give a talk on this occasion. The recipients will be invited by AITO to ECOOP (reasonable travel expenses and conference registration will be paid by AITO).

16. In addition to the presentation of the prize, the junior winner will receive from AITO a cash award of 2.000 Euros for future research expenses.

^{1. [Not including any parental or sick leave]}

Last modified: December 2021