2012: Jens Palsberg

The 2012 SIGPLAN service award goes to Jens Palsberg, who has led or served on an extraordinary number of program committees, mostly for SIGPLAN conferences and workshops. He was program chair of X10 '12, POPL '10, co-chair of SAS '09, chair of PDM '09, chair of EMSOFT in '08, chair of TACAS '06, chair of MemoCode '06, chair SREIS '02, co-chair of PASTE '02, and chair of SAS '00. He is general co-chair for ICESS '12, and previously was general chair of ICESS'10, SPIN in '08, POPL in '05, and conference chair for LICS in '09. He has been on the committees for almost 100 conferences and workshops between 1994 and 2013—an average of more than 5 per year over a 19 year period. Major conferences include POPL (3), PLDI (3), OOPSLA (3), ECOOP (11), SAS (7), ICSE (2), and EMSOFT(4).

Jens is the Editor-in-Chief for TOPLAS, having previously served as an associate editor. He is also on the SIGPLAN CACM Research Highlights Selection Committee, and on the Information & Computation Editorial Board. He was previously secretary/treasurer of SIGBED, and while his work in the SIGBED community is not directly related to SIGPLAN, he has actively contributed a languages-oriented perspective and agenda to that community. The high quality of conferences and journals in our field depends on diligent service on program committees and by editors. This award is a small way of thanking Jens for the decades of service he has given to our community in these vital roles.