MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer has received the Most Influential ICFP Paper Award for the 2016 paper "Higher-Order Ghost State," co-authored with MPI-SWS alumnus Ralf Jung as well as Robert Krebbers and Lars Birkedal.  The award recognises the paper’s lasting impact on the Iris program logic framework, which has become an important foundation for research on software verification. This award comes on top of the Most Influential POPL Paper Award for the Iris 1.0 paper (POPL'15) as well as the Alonzo Church Award that they received in 2023 for the four core papers on the foundations of Iris.

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

A video of the award presentation can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/live/wn88R35yqeY?t=26630s

Award citation: Higher-Order Ghost State represents a major milestone for the widely used Iris program logic framework.  Colloquially known as "Iris 2.0", the paper contributes a key feature: the ability to store arbitrary higher-order separation logic predicates in ghost variables.  The feature is justified using guarded recursion and a new algebraic structure called cameras - roughly, a generalization of PCMs with a form of step indexing.  Higher-order ghost state was later shown to be an essential building block from which other features like impredicative invariants and weakest preconditions could be derived.  Its broad and lasting impact is evident in the (currently) 165 papers that use Iris in some way, including 45 POPL, 29 PLDI, 25 ICFP, and 20 OOPSLA papers.

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 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.

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 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."

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.

MPI-SWS faculty Rupak Majumdar has received the ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation) Paper Award for 2011.

The ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential PLDI Paper Award is given each year for a paper that is ten years old and has been highly influential in the area of programming languages.

Rupak's 2001 paper, "Automatic Predicate Abstraction of C Programs," was coauthored with Thomas Ball, Todd Millstein, and Sriram Rajamani. The paper presented the predicate abstraction technology underlying the SLAM project. The technology is now part of Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier in the Windows Driver Development Kit. This is one of the earliest examples of automation of software verification on a large scale and the basis for numerous efforts to expand the domains that can be verified.

MPI-SWS faculty member Paul Francis has received the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for 2011.

The ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award recognizes papers published 10 to 12 years in the past in Computer Communication Review or any SIGCOMM sponsored or co-sponsored conference that is deemed to be an outstanding paper whose contents are still a vibrant and useful contribution today.

Paul's 2001 paper, "A Scalable Content-Addressable Network," was coauthored with Mark Handley, Richard Karp, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker. This paper is one of four highly influential papers that laid the foundation for P2P systems based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).