[TYPES/announce] Maria Christakis wins the EAPLS Best Phd Dissertation Award 2015:

[Arend Rensink]

It is the great pleasure of the European Association for Programming 
Languages and Systems to announce the outcome of the EAPLS Best 
Dissertation Award 2015 (http://eapls.org/items/330/).

This award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original 
and influential contribution to the area of Programming Languages and 
Systems, and has graduated in 2015 at a European academic institute. The 
purpose of the award is to draw attention to excellent work, to help the 
career of the student in question, and to promote the research field as 
a whole.

The winner of the 2015 edition of the EAPLS Dissertation Award is

      Dr. Maria Christakis
      ETH Zürich, Switzerland

for her dissertation on

      Narrowing the gap between verification and systematic testing

supervised by Peter Müller. The winner was selected by a committee of 
international experts. Details on the procedure can be found at 
http://eapls.org/pages/phd_award/. The candidate theses were judged on 
originality, impact, relevance, and quality of writing.

The jury concluded unanimously that Dr. Christakis' dissertation is an 
outstanding piece of work; it received the best marks amidst some very 
strong contenders. A summary of the jury's findings:

+ The thesis contains an effort in combining verification and testing, 
fields that seemed to be disjoint to date.

+ This thesis presents both novel theoretical and practical results on a 
high level. There are contributions that advance the state of the art 
both in testing and verification as well as a case study on a real piece 
of software.

+ Her contributions are significant and novel, the breadth is also 
"unusual" or "impressive", and she implemented and evaluated with 
industrial tools.

+ The results have been published in a series of internationally 
well-known conferences: FM, TACAS, ICSE, VMCAI, SEFM, RV, and SPIN.

+ The dissertation is very well written.

We offer Dr. Christakis our heartfelt congratulations with her 
achievement. We are confident that it will be a sign of a long and 
distinguished scientific career.

European Association for Programming Languages and Systems
http://eapls.org