Most Influential POPL Paper Award

Presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the POPL held 10 years prior to the award year. The award includes a prize of $1,000 to be split among the authors of the winning paper. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.

Recipients:

2010 (for 2000): Anytime, Anywhere: Modal Logics for Mobile Ambients, Luca Cardelli and Andrew D. Gordon

Citation

"Anytime, Anywhere: Modal Logics for Mobile Ambients" by Luca Cardelli and Andrew D. Gordon helped spur a flowering of work in the area of process calculi that continues today. The paper focused on modal logics for reasoning about both temporal and spacial modalities for ambient behaviours, demonstrating techniques that also apply to other process calculi (even those without an explicit notion of location), so contributing to excitement in an area that was growing at that time and continues. The work has led to application of concurrency theory in fields as diverse as security, safety critical applications, query languages for semistructured data, and systems biology.

2009 (for 1999): JFlow: Practical Mostly-Static Information Flow Control, Andrew C. Myers

Citation

"JFlow: Practical Mostly-Static Information Flow Control" by Andrew C. Myers demonstrated the practicality of using static information flow analysis to protect privacy and preserve integrity by giving an efficient information flow type checker for an extension of the widely-used Java language. The work has had a significant impact both within and beyond the programming language community. In particular, subsequent work for other languages has largely followed the path laid out in this paper, and the compiler infrastructure developed for JFlow (now called Jif) is widely used as a research platform. Furthermore, using the JFlow work as a basis, several major research initiatives are investigating the challenges of building complex, real-world systems with confidentiality guarantees.

2008 (for 1998): From System F to Typed Assembly Language, Greg Morrisett, David Walker, Karl Crary, and Neal Glew

Citation

"From System F to Typed Assembly Language" by Greg Morrisett, David Walker, Karl Crary, and Neal Glew began a major development in the  application of type system ideas to low level programming.  The paper shows how to compile a high-level, statically typed language into TAL, a typed assembly language defined by the authors. The type system for the assembly language ensures that source-level abstractions like closures and polymorphic functions are enforced at the machine-code level while permitting aggressive, low-level optimizations such as register allocation and instruction scheduling. This infrastructure provides the basis for ensuring the safety of untrusted low-level code artifacts, regardless of their source.  A large body of subsequent work has drawn on the ideas in this paper, including work on proof-carrying code and certifying compilers.

2007 (for 1997): Proof-carrying Code, George Necula

2006 (for 1996): Points-to Analysis in Almost Linear Time, Bjarne Steensgaard

2005 (for 1995): A Language with Distributed Scope, Luca Cardelli

2004 (for 1994): Implementation of the Typed Call-by-Value lambda-calculus using a Stack of Regions, Mads Tofte and Jean-Pierre Talpin

2003 (for 1993): Imperative functional programming, Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler.

Selection Committee
The award given in year N is for the most influential paper presented at the conference held in year N-10. The selection committee consists of the following members:

• the current SIGPLAN Chair,
• the General Chair and Program Chair for POPL N-10,
• the General Chair and Program Chair for POPL N-1, and
• a member of the SIGPLAN EC appointed by the SIGPLAN Chair.

The committee is chaired by the SIGPLAN Chair. The Chair shall also adjudicate conflicts of interest, appointing substitutes to the committee as necessary.