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.

We are pleased to announce that three new faculty will join MPI-SWS this fall.

Björn Brandenburg is joining us from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where he obtained his Ph.D. in computer science. Björn's research interests include multiprocessor real-time system, real-time synchronization protocols, and operating systems. Björn is the lead designer and developer of LITMUS^RT, an extension of the Linux kernel for real-time scheduling and synchronization on multicore platforms.

Deepak Garg is joining us from the Cybersecurity Lab (CyLab) at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a post-doctoral researcher. He obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department. His research interests are in the areas of computer security and privacy, formal logic and programming languages. He is specifically interested in logic-based models of secure systems and formal analysis of security properties of systems.

Ruzica Piskac is joining us from EPFL, where she has completed her Ph.D. in computer science. The goal of her research is to make software development easier and software more reliable via automated reasoning techniques. She is specifically interested in decision procedures, their combinations and applications in program verification and software synthesis.