We are proud to celebrate a series of outstanding achievements by members and alumni of our institute.

• Meeyoung Cha was awarded the Order of Science and Technology Merit (Innovation Medal) by South Korea, one of the country's highest honors for contributions to science and technology. 
• Savvas Zannettou will receive the Adamic-Glance Distinguished Early Career Award 2026, recognizing innovative contributions to Computational Social Science.
• Mainack Mondal, Denzil Correa, and Fabricio Benvenuto received the 2026 AAAI ICWSM Test-of-Time Runners-up Award for their influential 2016 paper, “Analysing the Targets of Hate in Online Social Media.”
• Keerthana Karnam, Abhisek Dash, and Sepehr Mousavi will receive the 2026 CNIL-INRIA Privacy Runners-up Award for their research on compliance with GDPR's Right of Access to Data across major online platforms.

Congratulations to all award recipients on these well-deserved recognitions. We are honored to have such talented researchers and alumni in our community!

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) has awarded their 2026 Distinguished Service Award to MPI-SWS Scientific Director Derek Dreyer. The award citation reads as follows:

Derek Dreyer has set an exemplary standard of service within the PL community. Throughout the years, Derek has served in almost every possible role in our community, including General Chair of ICFP’19, Program Chair of POPL’24, and Associate Chair of OOPSLA’23 and PLDI’26. Since 2017, he is an Associate Editor of TOPLAS; since 2023, he is on the PACMPL advisory board; and since 2022, he is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Functional Programming, presently overseeing the transfer of the journal to Diamond Open Access. But Derek’s service work began much earlier. While still an assistant professor, he was moderator of the TYPES mailing list and volunteered to serve on the SIGPLAN Executive Committee (2012-15) as Awards Chair. In 2020, he helped safeguard the perception of programming languages research outside the field, when the CORE ranking committee threatened to demote the rankings of several major PL conferences. Derek has also been a prominent mentor for students, postdocs, and junior faculty. He chaired early editions of PLMW and co-founded the RTFM workshop on faculty mentoring (at PLDI’24 and POPL’26). He frequently speaks at such events, and is known for his widely-cited talks on speaking and writing skills: “How to Write Papers and Give Talks That People Can Follow”. Last but not least, Derek has written popular blog posts touching on the more “human” aspects of a career in research such as: accepting criticism, handling rejection, struggling to maintain a work-life balance, and impostor syndrome. In summary, Derek has served the community in many ways, always striving to promote the value and the quality of PL research, to help maintain cohesion in our community, and to empower junior researchers to conduct outstanding PL research.

The Distinguished Service Award is given by ACM SIGPLAN to recognize distinguished service contributions to the Programming Languages Community. The award recognizes contributions to ACM SIGPLAN, its conferences, publications, or its local activities. The award includes a prize of $2,500.

Toghrul Karimov and Simon Spies have each been awarded a 2025 Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding scientific achievement. The Max Planck Society awards the Otto Hahn Medal annually to young scientists in recognition of outstanding scientific achievement. Toghrul was awarded the medal for fundamental contributions to automated formal verification of linear dynamical systems, while Simon was awarded the medal for his work on expanding both the expressive power and automated reasoning capabilities of the Iris framework for program verification.

Toghrul obtained his PhD in Feb 2024, and was advised by Joël Ouaknine. Toghrul is now a postdoctoral researcher within the ERC Synergy Grant "DynAMiCs", working with Valérie Berthé.

Simon obtained his PhD in August 2025, and was advised by Derek Dreyer. Simon is now a software engineer working on the OCaml compiler at Jane Street in London.

This is the second time in six years that two MPI-SWS students have been awarded the Otto Hahn Medal in the same year.

Mario Günzel, a postdoctoral researcher in the Real-Time Systems group, has been recognized with the 2024–2025 ACM SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award. The award, first given in 2013, recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems, in the spirit and legacy of Dr. Paul Caspi’s work. Mario Günzel's thesis, entitled Property-Based Timing Analysis of Distributed Real-Time Systems, was advised by Prof. Jian-Jia Chen at TU Dortmund.

The EATCS Award for the best theory paper at ETAPS 2026 was awarded to Isa Vialard, Joël Ouaknine and Quentin Guilmant for their paper "The value problem for weighted timed games with two clocks is undecidable", published in FoSSaCS 2026. The EATCS award is given each year to the best ETAPS papers in theoretical computer science.

The paper solves a long-standing open problem in the field of quantitative games. Weighted timed games were introduced in several works in the early 2000s, and constitute a fundamental model for formal verification and control. The key decision problems for quantitative games are the existence of winning strategies and the ‘value problem’: is the inf-sup across all pairs of Minimizer/Maximizer strategies smaller than a given rational? With three clocks, the value problem was proved undecidable in 2015. With a single clock, the problem was shown to be decidable in 2022. This paper finally closes the gap: with two clocks, both problems are shown to be undecidable using a novel and ingenious reduction, resulting in a deep contribution

MPI-SWS scientific director Joël Ouaknine was appointed as a Fellow by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). Joël, who leads the “Foundations of Algorithmic Verification” research group, was appointed EATCS fellow for "fundamental contributions to the algorithmic analysis of dynamical systems and related formalisms."

The EATCS Fellows Program was established by the association in 2014 to recognize outstanding EATCS members for their scientific achievements in the field of Theoretical Computer Science.

Further Information: 

• https://eatcs.org/index.php/component/content/article/1-news/3028--eatcs-fellows-class-of-2026-named
• https://www.eatcs.org/index.php/eatcs-fellows

Toghrul Karimov, a graduate student in Joël Ouaknine's Foundations of Automatic Verification Group, has received the 2025 Ackermann Award for his PhD thesis, “Algorithmic Verification of Linear Dynamical Systems.” The Ackermann Award is an international prize presented annually to the author of an exceptional doctoral dissertation in the field of Computer Science Logic.

The 2025 Salomaa prize has been awarded to MPI-SWS faculty member Georg Zetzsche "for the breadth and depth of his results in formal languages, automata theory, and logic, particularly the theory of downward closures, decidability in infinite-state systems, algorithmic group theory, and arithmetic theories, connecting formal languages and computation in the spirit of Arto Salomaa.”

The Salomaa prize in Automata Theory, Formal Languages and Related Topics is awarded each year by the Developments in Language Theory (DLT) Symposium. It was named to honour the scientific achievements and influence of Arto Salomaa, a founder of the DLT symposium. The prize consists of 2000 euros, funded by the University of Turku, Finland, the home university of Arto Salomaa.

MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer and his collaborators (including MPI-SWS alumni Ralf Jung, David Swasey, and Aaron Turon) have received the 2025 Most Influential POPL Paper Award for their POPL 2015 paper, "Iris: Monoids and Invariants as an Orthogonal Basis for Concurrent Reasoning" (https://iris-project.org/pdfs/2015-popl-iris1-final.pdf).  This comes on top of the Alonzo Church Award that they received in 2023 for the four core papers on the foundations of Iris.

The ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award is a retrospective award—it is given each year to the paper deemed most influential from the POPL conference 10 years earlier.

Award citation: This paper introduced Iris, a unifying framework for higher-order concurrent separation logic mechanized in the Rocq Prover (formerly Coq).  At the time Iris came along, the field of separation logic had become fractured, with many different and potentially incompatible logics being developed with bespoke models.  This first paper on Iris showed how a few key ingredients from prior work -- most notably, partial commutative monoids for representing user-defined ghost state (inspired by the Views framework) and higher-order impredicative invariants (inspired by step-indexed models) -- could be fruitfully combined to *derive* a wide variety of sophisticated proof techniques (such as “logically atomic triples”) that were built in as primitive in prior logics.  It was just the first step in a long line of work by a rich and diverse community of Iris developers from around the world.  Thanks to subsequent work on the Iris Proof Mode in Rocq, Iris has become a widely-used tool in both program verification and programming language meta-theory, with applications ranging from functional correctness proofs for low-level systems code (e.g. hypervisors, crash-safe systems, weak-memory data structures) to extensible semantic soundness proofs for high-level type systems (e.g. Rust, OCaml, Scala).

A video of the award presentation can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZKwpY0g9Lo8?si=scSr-qC9C44huJ_f&t=28949

MPI-SWS scientific director Derek Dreyer was appointed as a Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest computer science association in the world. Derek, who leads the “Foundations of Programming” research group, received this honor for his contributions to the logical and semantic foundations of programming languages.

The ACM Fellows program recognizes the 1% of ACM members who have made the most outstanding achievements in the field of computer and information technology. Worldwide 55 new ACM Fellows were elected this year, thirteen of them in Europe and four in Germany.

Further Information: 

• https://www.acm.org/media-center/2025/january/fellows-2024
• https://awards.acm.org/fellows/award-winners
• https://www.mpi-sws.org/people/dreyer/

Dr. Michael Sammler, who defended his doctoral thesis at Saarland University & MPI-SWS last December, has just received the Runner-Up Prize for the 2024 Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award!  This is a relatively new international dissertation award in computer science (initiated in 2023).  There were 23 nominations from across Europe this year (maximum 1 per university), and Michael's was ranked one of the top 3 dissertations.

Michael's dissertation is entitled "Automated and Foundational Verification of Low-Level Programs", and was supervised by MPI-SWS faculty Deepak Garg and Derek Dreyer.

Michael's dissertation has also received the Dr. Eduard Martin Prize from Saarland University.

Michael is currently doing a postdoc at ETH Zurich with Peter Müller, and in January 2025 he will start as a tenure-track faculty at IST Austria.

Congratulations, Michael, on this richly deserved honor!!!

The paper "On the Decidability of Monadic Second-Order Logic with Arithmetic Predicates", by Valérie Berthé, Toghrul Karimov, Joris Nieuwveld, Joël Ouaknine, Mihir Vahanwala and James Worrell, was selected as one of 7 "Distinguished Papers" at LICS 2024.

Distinguished Paper awards are given to about 10% of papers at LICS. These are papers that, in the view of the LICS program committee, make exceptionally strong contribution to the field and should be read by a broad audience due their relevance, originality, significance and clarity.

Pramod Bhatotia, who completed his doctoral studies at MPI-SWS, has received the 2023 EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award.

The EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award was created in 2014 by ACM EuroSys to reward junior European researchers who have demonstrated exceptional creativity and innovation in systems research, broadly construed. The award is given annually at the EuroSys conference, in memory of Jochen and his fundamental contributions to the systems community. The award is accompanied by a 2,000 EUR cash prize generously provided by RedHat.

Congratulations, Pramod!

MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer and nine of his collaborators (including notably UdS/MPI alumnus Ralf Jung, as well as former MPI-SWS postdocs Jacques-Henri Jourdan and Aaron Turon and UdS/MPI student David Swasey) have received the 2023 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation for their seminal work on the Iris framework for higher-order concurrent separation logic, specifically the following four papers:

• Ralf Jung, David Swasey, Filip Sieczkowski, Kasper Svendsen, Aaron Turon, Lars Birkedal, Derek Dreyer: “Iris: Monoids and Invariants as an Orthogonal Basis for Concurrent Reasoning”. POPL 2015.
• Ralf Jung, Robbert Krebbers, Lars Birkedal, Derek Dreyer: “Higher-order ghost state”. ICFP 2016.
• Robbert Krebbers, Ralf Jung, Aleš Bizjak, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Derek Dreyer, Lars Birkedal: “The Essence of Higher-Order Concurrent Separation Logic”. ESOP 2017.
• Ralf Jung, Robbert Krebbers, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Aleš Bizjak, Lars Birkedal, Derek Dreyer: “Iris from the ground up: A modular foundation for higher-order concurrent separation logic”. J. Funct. Program. 28 (2018).

The Church Award has been given out since 2016, and has typically been given to papers that were 20-25 years old (to allow time for foundational work on logic to have major impact).  In this case, however, the four awarded Iris papers were published only 5-8 years ago! In that relatively short period of time, Iris has served as a springboard for a huge amount of research in semantics and program verification, including over 70 papers in top venues (see the Iris project page), and it has been adopted as a core verification technology by a multitude of research groups around the world, as well as the systems verification company BedRock Systems.

More details about the Alonzo Church Award and about the 2023 Church Award.

Kaushik Mallik's thesis, entitled Pushing the Barriers in Controller Synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems, has been recognized with the 2023 ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the research areas in the scope of the ETAPS conferences, and has graduated at a European academic institution. Kaushik was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar.

This is the second time that the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award was given to an MPI-SWS student. In 2021 it was awarded to Ralf Jung for his thesis on Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language, supervised by Derek Dreyer.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) have authored a total of 6 papers accepted to POPL 2023.  This is the sixth year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5+ papers in POPL.  Furthermore, one Max Planck paper was awarded a 2023 POPL Distinguished Paper Award. Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

• Conditional Contextual Refinement by Youngju Song, Minki Cho, Dongjae Lee, Chung-Kil Hur, Michael Sammler, Derek Dreyer
• Context-Bounded Verification of Context-Free Specifications by Pascal Baumann, Moses Ganardi, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, Georg Zetzsche
• DimSum: A Decentralized Approach to Multi-language Semantics and Verification by Michael Sammler, Simon Spies, Youngju Song, Emanuele D’Osualdo, Robbert Krebbers, Deepak Garg, Derek Dreyer.  DISTINGUISHED PAPER
• Kater: Automating Weak Memory Model Metatheory and Consistency Checking by Michalis Kokologiannakis, Ori Lahav, Viktor Vafeiadis
• The Path to Durable Linearizability by Emanuele D’Osualdo, Azalea Raad, Viktor Vafeiadis
• CoqQ: Foundational Verification of Quantum Programs by Li Zhou, Gilles Barthe, Pierre-Yves Strub, Junyi Liu, Mingsheng Ying

MPI-SWS researcher Edon Kelmendi has received a Distinguished Paper award at the 2022 ACM/IEEE 37th Annual Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2022) for his paper Computing the Density of the Positivity Set for Linear Recurrence Sequences.

Distinguished Paper awards are given to about 10% of papers at LICS. These are papers that, in the view of the LICS program committee, make exceptionally strong contribution to the field and should be read by a broad audience due their relevance, originality, significance and clarity.

MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar has received the 2022 CONCUR Test-of-Time Award for his CONCUR 2003 paper on The Element of Surprise in Timed Games. The work was done in collaboration with Luca de Alfaro, Marco Faella, Thomas A. Henzinger, and Mariëlle Stoelinga.

The award citation reads as follows: "The paper studies concurrent two-player games played on timed game structures, and in particular the ones arising from playing on timed automata. A key contribution of the paper is the definition of an elegant timed game model, allowing both the representation of moves that can take the opponent by surprise as they are played "faster", and the definition of natural concepts of winning conditions for the two players -- ensuring that players can win only by playing according to a physically meaningful strategy. This approach provides a clean answer to the problem of time convergence, and the responsibility of the players in it. For this reason, it has since been the basis of numerous works on timed games. The algorithm established in the paper to study omega-regular conditions in this neat model of timed games is also enticing, resorting to mu-calculus on a cleverly enriched structure."

MPI-SWS faculty member Viktor Vafeiadis has received the 2022 Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, which is given by ACM SIGPLAN to recognize outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages.  The award citation reads as follows:

"Viktor has become a world leader in semantics and verification research. His body of work includes fundamental and influential contributions to the study of concurrency, in particular separation logic and relaxed memory models. His landmark doctoral thesis developed RGSep, the first extension of concurrent separation logic to support formal proofs about fine-grained concurrent algorithms.  His work on Cave presented the first fully automatic verifier for establishing linearizability of a class of concurrent data structures, including ones with non-fixed linearization points. His work on CompCertTSO presented the first verified compiler for a concurrent language under a relaxed memory model. He developed the first direct (and mechanized) proof of soundness for concurrent separation logic (CSL) based on operational semantics—beautifully simple compared to prior proofs and a key enabler for proving soundness of more advanced program logics like CAP and Iris. He developed the first separation logic for the C/C++ relaxed memory model—a tour-de-force achievement compared to the standard CSL which assumes sequential consistency. This spawned a whole body of work on modular verification of concurrent data structures under relaxed memory models. His work has found and corrected a number of serious flaws in the C/C++ concurrency model, which led to changes in the C++ standard. And his "promising" semantics for relaxed-memory concurrency offered one of the first viable solutions to the 30-year-old "out-of-thin-air" problem and spawned much follow-on work. His work on GenMC presented the first efficient model checkers for relaxed-memory C/C++ programs with optimality guarantees about their state space exploration. Recent work together with his postdoc Azalea Raad (now faculty at Imperial), presented the first "persistency semantics" for non-volatile memory on multicore architectures. Viktor is not only highly-cited and incredibly prolific—he is also a true pioneer, repeatedly exploring dauntingly technical problems in the semantics and verification of concurrent programs before others dare to try."

This award makes MPI-SWS the only institution in the world to boast two recipients of the SIGPLAN Milner award among its faculty.

MPI-SWS researchers Jiarui Gan, Rupak Majumdar, Goran Radanovic, and Adish Singla have received an Outstanding Paper Award Honorable Mention at AAAI 2022, for their paper "Bayesian Persuasion in Sequential Decision-Making."

The AAAI conference is one of the leading international venues for AI research, covering all sub-areas of the field. AAAI 2022 received more than 9000 submissions, of which 1370 were accepted for publication. Of these 1370 papers, only three papers were selected for an outstanding paper award. Of these three outstanding papers, two were authored by researchers at the Saarland Informatics Campus.

MPI-SWS scientific director Joël Ouaknine was appointed as a Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest computer science association in the world. Joel, who leads the “Foundations of Algorithmic Verification” research group, was appointed ACM fellow for his contributions to algorithmic analysis of dynamical systems.

ACM has also elected as Fellows two researchers from our neighboring Max Planck Institute for Informatics: Thomas Lengauer is recognized for contributions to bioinformatics and medical informatics and Bernt Schiele is recognized for contributions to large-scale object recognition, human detection, and pose estimation.

The ACM Fellows program recognizes the 1% of ACM members who have made the most outstanding achievements in the field of computer and information technology. Worldwide 71 new ACM Fellows were elected this year, twelve of them in Europe, four in Germany and three of them in Saarbrücken.

Further Information: 

• https://www.acm.org/media-center/2022/january/fellows-2021
• https://awards.acm.org/fellows/award-winners
• https://www.mpi-sws.org/people/joel/

Bob Harper, an MPI-SWS external scientific member, has received the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award---the most significant international career award in programming languages. He received the award for his "foundational contributions to our understanding of type theory and its use in the design, specification, implementation, and verification of modern programming languages".

Award Citation:

Robert (Bob) Harper is widely known for his foundational contributions to our understanding of type theory and its use in the design, specification, implementation, and verification of modern programming languages. Bob demonstrated that sound type systems and operational semantics are not only appropriate vehicles for reasoning about idealized languages, but that this theory can be applied to complex, modern languages. His achievements include analysis of language features ranging from references to continuations to modules, the definition of a variety of new type systems, the idea of using types throughout the compilation process, the analysis of run-time system semantics and cost, a formal definition of Standard ML and its mechanization, the definition of logical framework LF and other logical frameworks based on homotopy type theory.

Some of Bob’s most influential work involved the design, theory and implementation of the TIL (Typed Intermediate Language) compiler system, which pioneered the idea that compilers can propagate type information to lower-level intermediate languages, where it can be used to guide optimizations and to catch compiler bugs. These ideas led directly to the development of proof-carrying code, typed assembly language, and a wide array of type-preserving compilers.

Bob Harper has also had a profound impact though his mentorship, teaching and the influence of his books “Programming in Standard ML” and “Practical Foundations for Programming Languages.”

Sumit Gulwani, a scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, is one of two recipients of the 2021 Max Planck-Humboldt Medal. He will collaborate with MPI-SWS faculty Rupak Majumdar and Adish Singla on the problem of AI in Education.

With a background in program analysis and artificial intelligence, Sumit Gulwani shaped the field of program synthesis, which emerged around 2010. The computer scientist developed algorithms that can efficiently generate computer programs from very few input-output examples, natural-language-based specification, or from just the code and data context. His work made it possible for non-programmers to program tedious, repetitive spreadsheet tasks, and enabled productivity improvements for data scientists and developers for data wrangling and software engineering tasks. Recently, Sumit has also been using the tools of program synthesis for computer-aided education of pupils and students. Starting from the automatic correction of learners' work in programming education, he further evolved this line of work to detect misunderstandings and give learning feedback and grades, also in subjects like mathematics and language learning.

The medal comes with prize money in the amount of 60,000 euros.

Ralf Jung's thesis, entitled Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language, has been recognized with the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award. (The award this year was shared with Gagandeep Singh, a doctoral student at ETH Zurich). Ralf was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer.

This is the second year in a row that the ACM SIGPLAN Dissertation Award was given to an MPI-SWS student. Last year it was awarded to Filip Niksic for his thesis on Combinatorial Constructions for Effective Testing, supervised by Rupak Majumdar.

The award, first given in 2001, recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations in the area of Programming Languages.

Ralf Jung's doctoral dissertation on "Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language" has received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention. The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is considered to be one of the most prestigious international dissertation awards in the area of computer science, and there are only two Honorable Mentions given for the award each year. The Honorable Mention Award comes with a prize of $10,000 and an invitation to accept the award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco.

Ralf's work has previously received the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Otto Hahn Medal, as well as being featured in the April 2021 issue of Communications of the ACM in an article entitled "Safe Systems Programming in Rust". For more details see the Saarland Informatics Campus press release.

Joël Ouaknine, along with his co-authors James Worrell and Florian Luca, has received a Distinguished Paper award at the 2021 ACM/IEEE 36th Annual Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2021) for his paper Universal Skolem Sets.

Distinguished Paper awards are given to about 10% of papers at LICS. These are papers that, in the view of the LICS program committee, make exceptionally strong contribution to the field and should be read by a broad audience due their relevance, originality, significance and clarity.

Ralf Jung and Bilal Zafar have each been awarded a 2021 Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding scientific achievement. The Max Planck Society awards the Otto Hahn Medal annually to young scientists in recognition of outstanding scientific achievement. Ralf was awarded the medal for his work on the first formal foundations for the cutting-edge systems programming language Rust, while Bilal was awarded the medal for his work on developing responsible and trustworthy AI systems that can help reduce discrimination and polarisation in society. Ralf obtained his PhD in August 2020, and was advised by Derek Dreyer. Ralf is now a postdoc at MPI-SWS and research affiliate at MIT. Bilal obtained his PhD in February 2019, and was advised by Krishna Gummadi and Manuel Gomez Rodriguez. Bilal is now an Applied Scientist at Amazon Web Services.

Ralf Jung's doctoral dissertation on "Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language" has received the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2021. The award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the research areas in the scope of the ETAPS conferences, and has graduated in 2021 at a European academic institution. Ralf was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer.

A committee of international experts evaluated candidate dissertations with respect to originality, relevance, and impact to the field, as well as the quality of writing. The committee found that Dr. Ralf Jung's dissertation is very well-written and makes several highly original contributions in the area of programming language semantics and verification. The committee was also particularly impressed by the dissertation for its technical depth, the quality and quantity of the associated published work, as well as its relevance and impact both in academia and industry.

Ralf's work on Rust was also featured in a recent Communications of the ACM article: Safe Systems Programming in Rust by Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Robbert Krebbers, and Derek Dreyer. The article appeared in the April 2021 issue of CACM, together with a short video about this work produced by ACM.

Filip Niksic's thesis on "Combinatorial Constructions for Effective Testing" has won the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2020. This is an annual award given by ACM SIGPLAN for a doctoral dissertation in the field of programming languages. Filip was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar.

The award citation reads as follows: Soundness is at the core of most programming language verification techniques. On the other hand, random testing is one of the most commonly used techniques for analyzing software. Developing a theory of soundness for random testing is therefore a very important goal, but very few results existed before this thesis.Randomized techniques are seldom used in (sound) program analyses, which means that addressing the problem required the development of new ways to approaching it. Filip Niksic's thesis is among the first to apply deep techniques from randomized algorithms and combinatorics to the problem of understanding and explaining the effectiveness of random testing. Moreover, the theory helps with the design of new random testing approaches. The thesis addresses a hard problem, brining in novel theory from outside programming languages, and proving hard theorems. As scientists, when we see a phenomenon that we cannot immediately explain (in this case, the effectiveness of random testing), we should try to build a scientific explanation. For some problems, including random testing, it is unclear that one can actually formulate a precise theory, because the "real world" is extremely messy. The fact that Filip Niksic is able to formulate such problems precisely and prove nontrivial theorems about them is surprising and opens the door to a new field.

The third Salomaa prize has been awarded to MPI-SWS director Joël Ouaknine and James Worrell (Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University), for their outstanding contribution to Theoretical Computer Science, in particular to the theory of timed automata and to the analysis of dynamical systems.

The Salomaa prize in Automata Theory, Formal Languages and Related Topics is awarded each year by the Developments in Language Theory (DLT) Symposium. It was named to honour the scientific achievements and influence of Arto Salomaa, a founder of the DLT symposium. The prize consists of 2000 euros, funded by the University of Turku, Finland, the home university of Arto Salomaa.

The paper "ERIM: Secure, Efficient, In-process Isolation with Memory Protection Keys (MPK)" received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2019 Usenix Security Symposium. It was selected as one of 6 distinguished papers out of 113 papers that appeared in the conference proceedings.

The work was also selected as the recipient of the Usenix Internet Defense Prize, along with a USD 100k gift from Facebook to support  further development of the technology.

The paper was authored by MPI-SWS doctoral students Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Eslam Elnikety, and Michael Sammler, along with MPI-SWS intern Nuno Duarte and MPI-SWS faculty members Deepak Garg and Peter Druschel.

Read more about ERIM here.

MPI-SWS postdoctoral fellow Azalea Raad has been selected to attend the 7th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September 2019. An international committee of experts selected Azalea for one of only 200 spots reserved for young researchers from around the world.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum gives young computer science and math researchers the opportunity to interact with some of the world's top scientists. The speakers for the 2019 Forum, for example, include 17 different Turing Award winners, as well as numerous winners of the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize, and the ACM Prize in Computing.

MPI-SWS faculty member Jonathan Mace has received an honorable mention for the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Launched in 2013, the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (ACM SIGOPS) to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied. Only one winner is chosen annually, and this year, Jonathan Mace's dissertation received an Honorable Mention for the award.

"Many tools for monitoring and enforcing distributed systems," Jonathan explains, "capture information about end-to-end executions by propagating in-band contexts." In his thesis---A Universal Architecture for Cross-Cutting Tools in Distributed Systems---he characterizes a broad class of such cross-cutting tools and extends these ideas to new applications in resource management and dynamic monitoring. Finally, he identifies underlying commonalities in this class of tools, and proposes an abstraction layering that simplifies their development, deployment, and reuse.

MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer has received the 2017 Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, which is given by ACM SIGPLAN to recognize outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages.  The award citation reads as follows:

"Derek Dreyer has made deep, creative research contributions of great breadth. His areas of impact are as diverse as module systems, data abstraction in higher-order languages, mechanized proof systems and techniques, and concurrency models and semantics. He has refactored and generalized the complex module systems of SML and OCaml; devised logical relations and techniques that enabled advances in reasoning about higher-order imperative programs; and developed novel separation logics for modular verification of low-level concurrent programs. His research papers are a model of clarity and depth, and he has worked actively to translate his foundational ideas into practice – most recently with the RustBelt project to provide formal foundations for the Rust language. Additionally, Dreyer has contributed leadership, support, and mentorship in activities such as the PLMW series of workshops, which are instrumental in growing the next generation of PL researchers."

Previous recipients of the award have included Stephanie Weirich, David Walker, Sumit Gulwani, Lars Birkedal, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.

MPI-SWS researchers—faculty members Krishna Gummadi and Peter Druschel and former SWS doctoral students Alan Mislove and Massimiliano Marcon—have received the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for their IMC 2007 paper on "Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks." The work was done in collaboration with Bobby Bhattacharjee of the University of Maryland.

The award citation reads as follows: "This is one of the first papers that examine multiple online social networks at scale. By introducing novel measurement techniques, the paper has had an enduring influence on the analysis, modeling and design of modern social media and social networking services."

Amaury Pouly, a postdoc in Joël Ouaknine's Foundations of Automatic Verification Group, has received the 2017 Ackermann Award for his PhD thesis, “Continuous-time computation models: From computability to computational complexity.” The Ackermann Award is an international prize presented annually to the author of an exceptional doctoral dissertation in the field of Computer Science Logic.

Amaury Pouly's thesis shows that problems which can be solved with a computer in a reasonable amount of time (more specifically problems which belong to the class P of the famous open problem “P = NP?”) can be characterized as polynomial length solutions of polynomial differential equations. This result paves the way for reformulating certain questions and concepts of theoretical computer science in terms of ordinary polynomial differential equations. It also revisits analog computational models and demonstrates that analog and digital computers actually have the same computing power, both in terms of what they can calculate (computability) and what they can solve in reasonable (polynomial) time.

MPI-SWS researchers made a very strong showing at PLDI and ECOOP in Barcelona this year.  They received two Best Paper Awards, one from PLDI and one from ECOOP, for the following two papers:

PLDI 2017: Repairing Sequential Consistency in C/C++11, by Ori Lahav, Viktor Vafeiadis, Jeehoon Kang, Chung-Kil Hur, and Derek Dreyer.

ECOOP 2017: Strong Logic for Weak Memory: Reasoning About Release-Acquire Consistency in Iris, by Jan-Oliver Kaiser, Hoang-Hai Dang, Derek Dreyer, Ori Lahav, and Viktor Vafeiadis.

In addition, another PLDI best paper award went to the paper "Bringing the Web Up to Speed with WebAssembly", which was presented by Andreas Rossberg, former member of the Foundations of Programming group, who is now a senior engineer at Google.  WebAssembly is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between engineers at Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple to develop a new portable low-level byte code language to replace JavaScript as a target language for web development.

MPI-SWS Ph.D. student Aastha Mehta was selected to attend the 4th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September 2016. An international committee of experts selected Aastha for one of only 200 spots reserved for young computer scientists and mathematicians from around the world. In addition to participating in the forum, she was one of 6 researchers invited for a blog interview. Aastha was provided funding to attend the forum through a Romberg Grant.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum gives young computer science and math researchers the opportunity to interact with some of the world's top scientists. The twenty speakers for the 2016 Forum, for example, include 12 different Turing Award winners, as well as numerous winners of the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize.

MPI-SWS spinoff Aircloak has won the 2014 Cisco Internet of Things (IoT) Security Grand Challenge. Aircloak was selected for its innovative approach to privacy protection—it is building the world's first anonymized analytics system. As a grand challenge award winner, Aircloak was awarded a $75,000 cash prize and was showcased at the IoT World Forum. In addition, the award also provides the Aircloak team with mentoring, training and access to business expertise from Cisco and other supporting organizations, as well as potential investment and partnering opportunities in the future. For more info see the Cisco award announcement (in English or in German), and the Cisco blog.

Aaron Turon, a postdoc in Derek Dreyer's Foundations of Programming Group, has received the 2014 ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD thesis, "Understanding and Expressing Scalable Concurrency", which he completed at Northeastern University in 2013 under the supervision of Mitch Wand. This international award is presented annually to the author of the outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of Programming Languages. Aaron has recently joined Mozilla Research in San Francisco, where he is a member of the development team for the Rust programming language.

MPI-SWS Ph.D. student Arpan Gujarati has been selected to attend the 2nd annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September 2014. An international committee of experts seletecd Arpan for one of only 100 spots reserved for young computer scientists from around the world. In addition to participating in the forum, he will be one of 40 students given the opportunity to present his research in a poster session. The Heidelberg Laureate Forum gives young computer science and math researchers the opportunity to interact with some of the world's top scientists. The speakers for the 2014 Forum, for example, include 14 different Turing Award winners, as well as numerous winners of the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize.

MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar has been selected as the winner of this year's POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) Most Influential Paper Award. The ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award is a retrospective award—it is given each year to the paper deemed most influential from the POPL conference 10 years earlier.

Majumdar won the award for his 2004 paper, Abstractions From Proofs, which was coauthored with Thomas Henzinger, Ranjit Jhala, and Kenneth McMillan. The paper introduced a technique to automatically find program abstractions using logical interpolation and showed the effectiveness of the technique in software verification.

Björn Brandenburg, an MPI-SWS faculty member, has been awarded the Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the area of mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering. The award—North America's most prestigious honor for doctoral dissertations—recognizes recent doctoral recipients who have already made unusually significant and original contributions to their fields.

Brandenburg's dissertation, "Scheduling and Locking in Multiprocessor Real-Time Operating Systems," was also selected for the 2012 Linda Dykstra Distinguished Dissertation Award, which recognizes the best dissertation among all graduates in the fields of mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.