John Vlissides Award

In recognition of the contributions to computer science that John Vlissides made during his lifetime, SIGPLAN has established the John Vlissides Award. The award is presented annually to a doctoral student participating in the OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium showing significant promise in applied software research. All doctoral candidates participating in the annual OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium are eligible. The award includes a prize of $2,000.

The John Vlissides Award was established by generous contributions from the following companies, individuals, and organizations: IBM, Addison-Wesley, William Pugh, and SIGPLAN.

Recipients:

2009: Tudor Dumitras, Carnegie Mellon University

To be provided.

2008: Ciera Jaspan, Carnegie Mellon University

Ciera Jaspan's research targets the programming difficulties associated with using software frameworks. Plug-in writers need to satisfy a variety of framework constraints, and Ciera is directly motivated by the kinds of plug-in errors that frequently arise in today's frameworks. She has defined a new abstraction for expressing framework constraints as well as lightweight annotations and an associated static analysis to enforce this abstraction. Ciera is focused on making the right tradeoffs to ensure her solution is useful in practice.

Selection Committee

The selection committee consists of the following members:

• the OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium Committee,
• the OOPSLA Program Chair, and
• a representative of SIGPLAN appointed by the SIGPLAN Chair.

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