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 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.