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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.

Recipients:

2008: Two Awards Presented

Michael Bond, University of Texas at Austin. Diagnosing and Tolerating Bugs in Deployed Systems
Advisor: Kathyrn McKinley

Citation

"This dissertation makes several significant contributions to the problems of tracking down and tolerating software errors in deployed systems. It proposes a variety of techniques, ranging from a breakthrough, probabilistic method of compactly representing calling contexts, to novel techniques for tracking null pointers, to garbage collector modifications that let programs tolerate memory leaks. The evaluation committee was impressed by Michael's fresh perspective on these problems and the thorough experimental evaluation by which he backs up his claims. His research has already had broad adoption and impact, and we believe that his techniques will be brought to bear on a wide range of future applications."

Viktor Vafeiadis, University of Cambridge. Modular Fine-grained Concurrency Verification
Advisors: Alan Mycroft and Matthew Parkinson

Citation

"This dissertation introduces a novel logic for reasoning about concurrent shared-memory programs. This logic subsumes both rely/guarantee reasoning and separation logic in an elegant and natural manner. The dissertation establishes the semantic properties of the logic and demonstrates its applicability on a range of highly complex concurrent algorithms and data structures. The evaluation committee found the clarity of Viktor's presentation and the technical depth of his results particularly compelling, and we believe that this work creates a foundation for new tools and automated techniques for reasoning about concurrent programs."

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. The committee believes this work has great potential for long-term utility."

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. The committee believes this work will have considerable impact and value in practice."

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

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 5th 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 2 people in addition to the nominator.

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