[TYPES/announce] The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2007

[Vasco Vasconcelos]

AITO is very proud to announce that the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2007  
will be given to Luca Cardelli, Microsoft Research Cambridge (Senior  
prize) for his overall contribution to both theory and practice for  
object-oriented languages, and to Jonathan Aldrich, Carnegie Mellon  
University Pittsburgh (Junior prize) for his recent contribution to  
expressing and verifying software architecture in object-oriented  
languages.

Luca Cardelli systematically developed typing theories for objects,  
from record types to bounded quantification, eventually leading to  
the famous book "A Theory of Objects", published with Martin Abadi in  
1996. This masterpiece develops an "object calculus" as a foundation  
for object-oriented languages, in much the same way that Church's  
lambda-calculus is a foundation for procedural languages. Overall,  
Luca's work was inspired by strong expertise on language design,  
including functional languages and theory, such as ML, and object- 
oriented languages such as Modula-3. This leads Luca to further  
contribute to language design in the domain of mobility and locality  
with contributions such as Obliq and Ambient. The Ambient Calculus  
(developed with Andy Gordon) enables the formal analysis of mobile  
and wide-area systems, in part by taking advantage of a decade of  
previous work on process algebra. This work on mobility indirectly  
led to his recent interest in Systems Biology.

Jonathan Aldrich develops lightweight ways to statically assure  
architectural characteristics of large, real-world object-oriented  
systems. His pioneering thesis work on ArchJava (with advisors Craig  
Chambers and David Notkin) was the first system to verify at compile  
time that the dynamic structure of an object-oriented application  
conforms to an abstract, hierarchical software architecture.  
ArchJava, like Jonathan's other work, tackles head-on challenging  
aspects of object-oriented systems, including aliasing, reentrancy,  
inheritance, and the use of sophisticated design patterns. Jonathan's  
research is grounded in formal soundness proofs yet is validated  
through case study evaluations with realistic software systems and  
tasks. More recently, Jonathan and his students have made  
contributions in other aspects of object-oriented architecture  
assurance, including object protocol checking, modularity in aspect- 
oriented programming, and novel object models.

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, AITO  
has established in 2004 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 pioneers. For 2006, the prize committee has  
recommended deviating from the norm and giving one prize but to a  
group of four people.

The prizes will be awarded in July at ECOOP 2007, July 30 - August  
03, Berlin, Germany. Luca Cardelli and Jonathan Aldrich have agreed  
to give keynotes talks. For details, see the conference program.
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