MPI-SWS faculty member Peter Druschel has received the 2025 IEEE TCDP Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for his pioneering contributions to the design and implementation of large-scale distributed systems.
For more information on the award and other recent recipients, see here.
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.
...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 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.
...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:
MPI-SWS researchers Simon Spies, Lennard Gäher, Michael Sammler, and Derek Dreyer have received the PLDI 2024 Distinguished Artifact Award for their paper Quiver: Guided Abductive Inference of Separation Logic Specifications in Coq.
Filip Marković, a postdoctoral research at MPI-SWS, has received an award for the best presentation at RTSS’22. The award was given for his talk on "Analytical Approximations in Probabilistic Analysis of Real-Time Systems."
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,
...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:
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,
...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 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 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.
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,
...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.
MPI-SWS researchers Arpan Gujarati, Safya Alzayat, Wei Hao, Antoine Kaufmann, and Jonathan Mace, along with Reza Karimi and Ymir Vigfusson from Emory University, have received the OSDI Distinguished Artifact Award for their paper, Serving DNNs like Clockwork: Performance Predictability from the Bottom Up.
See here for a video of their cinematic conference presentation.
Read more about the OSDI artifact evaluation process.
MPI-SWS faculty member Joël Ouaknine has been elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2020. This is the second election for MPI-SWS, following the election of Peter Druschel as a member in 2008.
The aim of the Academy is to promote European research, advise governments and international organisations in scientific matters, and further interdisciplinary and international research.
More information: Joel's Academia Europaea page and the list of all members elected in 2020
Debasmita Lohar, a doctoral student at MPI-SWS, has received an award for the best presentation at the iFM 2019 PhD Symposium. The award was given for her talk on "Sound Probabilistic Numerical Error Analysis.”
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 "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,
...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 Derek Dreyer was one of two PC members (out of a total of 30 PC members) to win a Distinguished Reviewer Award at OOPSLA 2018.
MPI-SWS Ph.D. student Aastha Mehta has been selected to attend the Rising Stars Workshop to be held at MIT from October 28-30, 2018. She is one of 76 participants, and one of only three invited from a European university. Rising Stars is a prestigious workshop that provides mentoring to women graduate students and postdocs interested in pursuing an academic career.
MPI-SWS graduate student Arpan Gujarati has won the Best Presentation Award at the 30th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS18) for a talk on his paper entitled "Quantifying the Resiliency of Fail-Operational Real-Time Networked Control Systems" (with Mitra Nasri and Björn Brandenburg). Congratulations, Arpan!
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.
...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 Director Peter Druschel was honored with a Microsoft Outstanding Collaborator Award. The award was given for his numerous contributions to Microsoft Research over the years. Druschel's collaborative work with Microsoft Research has generated a long stream of seminal papers. One of the most noteworthy is his paper on the distributed hash table Pastry --- a paper that is one of the most highly cited papers ever written by MSR researchers.
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,
...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.
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.
...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.
Lorenzo Alvisi, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award provides support for him to spend up to a year at the institute, where he will work with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on fault-tolerant computing for multi-core servers.
This is the second year that an MPI-SWS visiting professor has received a Humboldt Award.
...Lorenzo Alvisi, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award provides support for him to spend up to a year at the institute, where he will work with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on fault-tolerant computing for multi-core servers.
This is the second year that an MPI-SWS visiting professor has received a Humboldt Award. Johannes Gehrke was a 2010 Humboldt Research Award recipient.
The Humboldt Research Award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future."
Johannes Gehrke, a professor at Cornell University, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award will provide support for him to spend eight months in Germany, working with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on data-intensive distributed systems that make up the software infrastructure inside such large Web companies as Amazon, Yahoo! and Google.
The Humboldt Research Award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries,
...Johannes Gehrke, a professor at Cornell University, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award will provide support for him to spend eight months in Germany, working with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on data-intensive distributed systems that make up the software infrastructure inside such large Web companies as Amazon, Yahoo! and Google.
The Humboldt Research Award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future."
Andreas Haeberlen has been awarded the 2009 Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding scientific achievement. The medal, and its accompanying monetary prize, will be presented to Andreas at the Max Planck society's annual General Assembly in Hannover on June 16. Andreas's medal was awarded for "pioneering work on accountability in distributed computer systems, in particular for the design, implementation and demonstration of practical techniques for the reliable and tamper-proof detection of complex faults." Andreas obtained his PhD in Spring 2009 and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
...Andreas Haeberlen has been awarded the 2009 Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding scientific achievement. The medal, and its accompanying monetary prize, will be presented to Andreas at the Max Planck society's annual General Assembly in Hannover on June 16. Andreas's medal was awarded for "pioneering work on accountability in distributed computer systems, in particular for the design, implementation and demonstration of practical techniques for the reliable and tamper-proof detection of complex faults." Andreas obtained his PhD in Spring 2009 and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Founded in 1948, the Max Planck Society is a non-profit scientific organization affiliated with the Max Planck Institutes. The Society awards the Otto Hahn Medal annually to young scientists in recognition of outstanding scientific achievement. In addition to a stipend, the award gives winners preference for grants enabling them to conduct research abroad for one year.
MPI-SWS fellow Michael Backes has been honored as a recipient of the ERC Starting Grant 2009. Michael was also recently selected by the editors of Technology Review as one of the 35 young innovators under the age of 35 whose work they found most exciting.
The ERC Starting Grant was established in 2007 by the European Research Council to support up-and-coming research leaders in Europe. Recipients are selected based upon "outstanding track-record of early achievements appropriate to their research field and career stage."
Michael's 2009 Young Innovator award is based on his work proving that Internet security protocols can really be trusted.
...MPI-SWS fellow Michael Backes has been honored as a recipient of the ERC Starting Grant 2009. Michael was also recently selected by the editors of Technology Review as one of the 35 young innovators under the age of 35 whose work they found most exciting.
The ERC Starting Grant was established in 2007 by the European Research Council to support up-and-coming research leaders in Europe. Recipients are selected based upon "outstanding track-record of early achievements appropriate to their research field and career stage."
Michael's 2009 Young Innovator award is based on his work proving that Internet security protocols can really be trusted. Software designed by Backes' group can prove in less than a second whether an Internet protocol is truly secure.
Michael received his Ph.D. from Saarland University in 2002. He was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Zurich Research laboratory before accepting his current position as a professor at Saarland University in 2006. He was named a fellow of the Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems in 2007.
Patrick Loiseau, an Assistant Professor in the Data Science department at EURECOM, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award provides support for him to spend up to a year at the institute, where he will work with Krishna Gummadi and other MPI-SWS researchers on security and privacy issues in social computing systems.