MPI-SWS researchers Tung Phung and Adish Singla, jointly with colleagues from the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota and Microsoft, have received a Best Paper Award at the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS 2026), for their paper titled Closing the Loop: An Instructor-in-the-Loop AI Assistance System for Supporting Student Help-Seeking in Programming Education. At SIGCSE TS 2026, only 9 papers were given this award out of 174 accepted papers. Congratulations!

Anthony W. Lin -- Max Planck Fellow at MPI-SWS and CS professor at RPTU in Kaiserslautern -- has received an Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR 2026, one of the flagship conferences in machine learning, for his work on "Transformers are Inherently Succinct” (https://openreview.net/forum?id=Yxz92UuPLQ)!

This is an incredible achievement — only two out of over 5,000 accepted ICLR papers have received such an award this year!

MPI-SWS researchers Filip Marcović and Björn Brandenburg, jointly with colleagues from TU Dortmund, have received an Outstanding Paper Award at the 45th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2024) for their paper entitled A Distribution-Agnostic and Correlation-Aware Analysis of Periodic Tasks. Congratulations!

MPI-SWS faculty member Andrea Lattuada, along with his collaborators, has received one of three Best Paper awards at the 18th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2024) for his paper Anvil: Verifying Liveness of Cluster Management Controllers.

The Best Paper Award at the 27th International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control went to Rajab Aghamov, Christel Baier, Toghrul Karimov, Joel Ouaknine and Jakob Piribauer for their paper "Linear Dynamical Systems with Continuous Weight Functions."

Cedric Courtaud and Björn Brandenburg have received the Best Paper award at the 29th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2023) for their paper entitled "G(IP)²C: Temporally Isolated Multiprocessor Real-Time IPC with Server-to-Server Invocations".

The EATCS Best Paper Award at ETAPS 2023 (https://etaps.org/awards/best-paper/) went to Pascal Baumann, Flavio D'Alessandro, Moses Ganardi, Oscar Ibarra, Ian McQuillan, Lia Schütze and Georg Zetzsche for their paper "Unboundedness problems for machines with reversal-bounded counters", published in FoSSaCS 2023. The EATCS award is given each year to the best ETAPS paper in theoretical computer science.

Arpan Gujarati (a former postdoctoral fellow at MPI-SWS) and Björn Brandenburg (an MPI-SWS faculty member) have received the 2022 Best Paper Award at the 43rd IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) for their paper "In-ConcReTeS: Interactive Consistency meets Distributed Real-Time Systems, Again!"

MPI-SWS researchers Marco Maida, Sergey Bozhko, and Björn Brandenburg have received an Outstanding Paper Award at the 34th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Computing Systems (ECRTS 2022) for their paper entitled Foundational Response-Time Analysis as Explainable Evidence of Timeliness. Congratulations!

MPI-SWS researchers Sergey Bozhko, Georg von der Bruggen, and Björn Brandenburg have received the 2021 Best Paper Award at the 42nd IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) for their work on "Monte Carlo Response-Time Analysis".

MPI-SWS researchers Sergey Bozhko and Björn Brandenburg have received an Outstanding Paper Award at the 32nd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Computing Systems (ECRTS 2020) for their paper entitled Abstract Response-Time Analysis: A Formal Foundation for the Busy-Window Principle. Congratulations!

MPI-SWS researchers Arpan Gujarati, Sergey Bozhko, and Björn Brandenburg have received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 26th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2020) for their paper entitled Real-Time Replica Consistency over Ethernet with Reliability Bounds. Congratulations!

MPI-SWS faculty member Deepak Garg, along with his external collaborators Carmine Abate, Roberto Blanco, Catalin Hritcu, Marco Patrignani and Jérémy Thibault, has been awarded a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF 2019). Their paper is titled "Journey Beyond Full Abstraction: Exploring Robust Property Preservation for Secure Compilation".

Vineet Rajani and Deepak Garg, along with their co-authors Marco Vassena, Alejandro Russo and Deian Stefan, have won a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2019) for their paper titled "From fine- to coarse-grained dynamic information flow control and back".

Burcu Kulahcioglu Ozkan, Rupak Majumdar, and Filip Niksic--along with their co-authors Mitra Tabaei Befrouei and Georg Weissenbacher--have won a Distinguished Paper award at the 2018 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2017) for their paper "Randomized testing of distributed systems with probabilistic guarantees."

Distinguished Paper awards are given to about 10% of papers at OOPSLA.

Mahmoud Salamati and Rupak Majumdar have received the Best Paper Award at the 15th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems (QEST 2018) for their paper entitled “Approximate Time Bounded Reachability for CTMCs and CTMDPs: A Lyapunov Approach” (with Sadegh Soudjani from Newcastle University).

Felipe Cerqueira and Björn Brandenburg have received an Outstanding Paper Award at the 30th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2018) for their paper entitled “On Strong and Weak Sustainability, with an Application to Self-Suspending Real-Time Tasks” (with Geoffrey Nelissen of CISTER Research Centre, ISEP, Polytechnic Institute of Porto).

A paper by Vineet Rajani and Deepak Garg has been honored as a distinguished paper at the upcoming 31st IEEE Symposium on Computer Security Foundations (CSF 2018). The paper is titled "Types for Information Flow Control: Labeling Granularity and Semantic Models".

Björn Brandenburg has won an Outstanding Paper award at the 24th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2018) for his paper entitled “Scalable Memory Reclamation for Multi-Core, Real-Time Systems” (with Yuxin Ren, Guyue Liu, and Gabriel Parmer of George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA).

MPI-SWS PhD student Arpan Gujarati has won the Middleware 2017 Best Student Paper award for his paper "Swayam: Distributed Autoscaling to Meet SLAs of Machine Learning Inference Services with Resource Efficiency.” The paper was co-authored with MPI-SWS faculty member Björn Brandenburg, as well as with Sameh Elnikety, Yuxiong He, and Kathryn McKinley. This paper is the result of the work Arpan did during his internship at Microsoft Research.

David Swasey, Deepak Garg, and Derek Dreyer have won a Distinguished Paper award at the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2017) for their paper "Robust and Compositional Verification of Object Capability Patterns."

Distinguished Paper awards are given to about 10% of papers at OOPSLA.

Pratyush Patel, Manohar Vanga, and Björn Brandenburg have won the Best Paper award at the 23rd IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2017) for their paper entitled "TimerShield: Protecting High-Priority Tasks from Low-Priority Timer Interference".

Mitra Nasri and Björn Brandenburg have won an Outstanding Paper award at the 23rd IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2017) for their paper entitled "Offline Equivalence: A Non-Preemptive Scheduling Technique for Resource-Constrained Embedded Real-Time Systems".

The MPI-SWS Real-Time Systems group, led by Björn Brandenburg, has won the best paper award at ECRTS’16, the best paper award at RTSS’16, and the best paper award at RTAS’17. These are the three main conferences in real-time systems.  This is the first time a group has won best paper awards in all three consecutive top real-time systems conferences. Congratulations to Björn and the postdocs and students in the real-time systems group!

The MPI-SWS paper "Fairness Beyond Disparate Treatment & Disparate Impact: Learning Classification without Disparate" has received a Best Paper Award Honorable Mention at WWW 2017.

The 26th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) took place in Perth (Australia) in April 2017.

Björn Brandenburg and Mahircan Gül have won the best paper award at the 37th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2016) for their paper entitled "Global Scheduling Not Required: Simple, Near-Optimal Multiprocessor Real-Time Scheduling with Semi-Partitioned Reservations".

Mitra Nasri has received the best paper award at the 24th International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS 2016) for her paper entitled "On the Problem of Finding Optimal Harmonic Periods” (with Morteza Mohaqeqi, Yang Xu, Anton Cervin, and Karl-Erik Arzén).

Felipe Cerqueira, Felix Stutz, and Björn Brandenburg have received the best paper award at ECRTS 2016, for their paper "Prosa: A Case for Readable Mechanized Schedulability Analysis." Read more about Prosa.

Krishna Gummadi, Mainack Mondal and Bimal Viswanath, along with Yabing Liu and MPI-SWS alumni Alan Mislove, have received a distinguished paper award at SOUPS 2014, for their paper "Understanding and Specifying Social Access Control Lists."

MPI-SWS faculty member Björn Brandenburg and PhD student Alexander Wieder have won the 2013 SIES (IEEE Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems) Best Paper Award for their paper "Efficient Partitioning of Sporadic Real-Time Tasks with Shared Resources and Spin Locks".

MPI-SWS faculty member Björn Brandenburg and PhD students Arpan Gujarati and Felipe Cerqueira have won a 2013 ECRTS Outstanding Paper Award for their paper "Schedulability Analysis of the Linux Push and Pull Scheduler with Arbitrary Processor Affinities."

MPI-SWS faculty member Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, along with his co-authors, has won the 2013 WWW Best Paper Award for his paper "No Country for Old Members: User Lifecycle and Linguistic Change in Online Communities."

Krishna Gummadi and Farshad Kooti, along with Winter Mason and previous MPI-SWS postdoctoral fellow Meeyoung Cha, have received a best paper award at ICWSM 2012, for their paper "The Emergence of Conventions in Online Social Networks."

MPI-SWS faculty member Björn Brandenburg, along with James H. Anderson (UNC), has received the ACM SIGBED EMSOFT 2011 best paper award for his paper "Real-time resource-sharing under clustered scheduling: mutex, reader-writer, and k-exclusion locks."

Congratulations to Meeyoung Cha, Juan Antonio Navarro Perez, and Hamed Haddadi. Their paper "Flash Floods and Ripples: The Spread of Media Content through the Blogosphere" was selected as the ICWSM'09 best paper using the Spinn3r dataset. The winning paper was selected out of all papers in the main conference and the data challenge workshop that used the 2009 Spinn3r blog dataset.