The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2024

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2024.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Rachid Guerraoui.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Alvin Cheung.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2024 will be given during ECOOP 2024 held in held in Vienna, Austria, 16 - 20 September 2024.

Rachid Guerraoui (EPFL)

Over several decades, Rachid Guerraoui has made significant contributions to distributed programming with objects, atomicity and transactions. At the intersection with Programming Languages, he has made important contributions to event-based programming and software transactional memory, including introducing "opacity" as a key feature of a correct implementation of transactional memory. The bodies of work that Guerraoui has contributed have had major impact on the Programming Languages community and ECOOP.

Alvin Cheung (UC Berkeley)

Alvin Cheung is best known for his groundbreaking and now extensive line of work on applying ideas from program synthesis to dramatically improve the end-to-end performance of database-backed applications. Known as "verified lifting", Alvin has demonstrated repeatedly the usefulness of this approach in multiple, and quite different, domains, and these demonstrations have been sufficiently convincing that others have started to pick up the technique and apply it in their own work: e.g. the verified lifting approach has been applied to problems in programming languages, software engineering, databases and graphics. In recent work (published at ECOOP) he has demonstrated the application of program synthesis to automate the construction of code transpilers for domain-specific languages.

The Members of the 2024 Dahl-Nygaard Award Committee are:

• Alastair Donaldson (chair)

• John Boyland (vice chair)

• Emina Torlak

• Niki Vazou

• Jingling Xie

The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prizes are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, two pioneers in the area of programming and simulation. Their foundational work on object-oriented programming, made concrete in the Simula language, is one of the most important inventions in software engineering. Their key ideas were expressed already around 1965, but took over 20 years to be absorbed and appreciated by the broader software community. After that, object-orientation has profoundly transformed the landscape of software design and development techniques. It was a great loss to our community that both Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard passed away in 2002. In remembrance of their scholarship and enthusiastic encouragement of young researchers, in 2004 AITO established a prize to be awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential for following in the footsteps of these two pioneers.

AITO (Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of object technology. As of January 2021, it has 59 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Davide Ancona.