Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

Presented annually to the author of the outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of Programming Languages. The award includes a prize of $1,000. The winner can choose to receive the award at ICFP, OOPSLA, POPL, or PLDI.

Selection Committee The chair of the selection committee is a member of the EC appointed by the SIGPLAN chair. Other committee members are selected by the chair of the selection committee with approval of the SIGPLAN chair. The SIGPLAN Chair is an ex officio member of the committee and shall adjudicate conflicts of interest, appointing substitutes to the committee as necessary.

Nominations Nominations must be submitted to the secretary of SIGPLAN by January 3rd to be considered for that year's award. The nominated dissertation must be available in an English language version to facilitate evaluation by the selection committee.

A nomination should consist of the following items:

  • Name, address, phone number, and email address of the person making the nomination (the nominator).
  • Name, address, phone number, and email address of the candidate for whom an award is recommended (the nominee).
  • A short statement (200-500 words) explaining why the nominee deserves the award in question.
  • Supporting statements from up to two people in addition to the nominator.

Recipients of the Outstanding Dissertation Award

2012: Dan Marino

U. California Los Angeles

Advisor: Todd Millstein

This dissertation addresses the problem of obtaining reliable results from concurrent programs. As a first step, the dissertation presents LiteRace, which uses sampling to dynamically detect race conditions. As a second step, the dissertation presents DRFx, which is a memory model that enforces sequential consistency, where hardware and software share responsibility for detecting violations of sequential consistency. Finally, the dissertation presents the design of an optimizing compiler that preserves sequential consistency. The dissertation thus demonstrates how a revised distribution of responsibilities among programmers, programming languages, and hardware can help detect and avoid concurrency violations. The committee was impressed with the dissertation's broad vision for both the problems of concurrency and the possible solutions.

Selection committee:

  • John Boyland (U. Wisconsin Milwaukee)
  • Chen Ding (U. Rochester)
  • Matthew Flatt (U. Utah)
  • David Gregg (Trinity U.)
  • Norman Ramsey (Tufts U.)
  • Jeremy Siek (U. Colorado)
  • Adam Welc (Oracle)

2010: Robert L. Bocchino, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

An Effect System and Language for Deterministic-by-Default Parallel Programming
Advisor: Vikram Adve

Citation

"This dissertation makes several significant contributions to the field of parallel and concurrent programming. The main technical contribution is a type and effect system that enables reasoning about non-interference at a fine granularity. A second contribution is support for non-deterministic code sections that are explicitly marked as such. A third contribution is support for object-oriented frameworks, where user extensions are guaranteed to adhere to the framework's effect restrictions. These contributions are backed by formal models, soundness proofs, and the Deterministic Parallel Java implementation. Evaluation shows that highly satisfactory speedups can be achieved on interesting code bases, sometimes beating the performance of hand-crafted implementations. The members of the award committee were impressed by the quality of the work and the clarity of the presentation."

Selection commmittee: Ras Bodik, Matthew Dwyer, Matthew Flatt, Matthew Fluet, Kevin Hammond, Nathaniel Nystrom, Kostis Sagonas, Peter Sewell, Peter Thiemann

Link to Student

2009: Two Awards Presented

Akash Lal, University of Wisconsin.

Interprocedural Analysis and the Verification of Concurrent Programs
Advisor: Thomas Reps

Citation

"This dissertation develops improvements to interprocedural program analysis through context-bounded analysis and through Lal's extended weighted push down systems, which generalize weighted push down systems to handle local variables.

2008: Two Awards Presented

Michael Bond, University of Texas at Austin

Diagnosing and Tolerating Bugs in Deployed Systems
Advisor: Kathryn McKinley

Citation

"This dissertation makes several significant contributions to the problems of tracking down and tolerating software errors in deployed systems.

2007: Swarat Chaudhuri, University of Pennsylvania

Logics and Algorithms for Software Model Checking
Advisor: Rajeev Alur

Citation

"The thesis explores a formalism called nested trees, that can represent complex branching behavior (loops and recursion) and support modular statement of context-sensitive correctness conditions. It further makes a specific technical contribution by offering the first algorithm for reachability in in nested trees that is sub-cubic in performance.

2006: Xiangyu Zhang, University of Arizona

Fault Location via Dynamic Slicing
Advisor: Rajiv Gupta

Citation

"Dynamic slicing is a technique for determining which variables and data structures affected values causing a fault (bug) at a particular location in a particular run of a program, thus allowing a programmer to work backwards to determine the ultimate cause of a fault. Previously this approach was too expensive to use in practice. Zhang has improved the performance by orders of magnitude, making it practical.

Past Recipients of the Outstanding Dissertation Award

2005: Sumit Gulwani, University of California, Berkeley
Program Analysis using Random Interpretation
Advisor: George Necula

2003: Godmar Back, University of Utah
Isolation, Resource Management and Sharing in the KaffeOS Java Runtime System
Advisor: Wilson Hsieh

2002: Michael Hicks, University of Pennsylvania
Dynamic Software Updating
Advisor: Scott Nettles

2001: Rastislav Bodik, University of Pittsburgh Path-Sensitive Value-Flow Optimizations of Programs
Advisors: Rajiv Gupta and Mary Lou Soffa