News: Dissertation Award

Kaushik Mallik awarded ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award

Kaushik Mallik's thesis, entitled Pushing the Barriers in Controller Synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems, has been recognized with the 2023 ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the research areas in the scope of the ETAPS conferences, and has graduated at a European academic institution. Kaushik was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar.

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Kaushik Mallik's thesis, entitled Pushing the Barriers in Controller Synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems, has been recognized with the 2023 ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the research areas in the scope of the ETAPS conferences, and has graduated at a European academic institution. Kaushik was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar.

This is the second time that the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award was given to an MPI-SWS student. In 2021 it was awarded to Ralf Jung for his thesis on Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language, supervised by Derek Dreyer.

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MPI-SWS students receive ACM SIGPLAN Dissertation Award two years in a row

September 14, 2021

Ralf Jung's thesis, entitled Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language, has been recognized with the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award. (The award this year was shared with Gagandeep Singh, a doctoral student at ETH Zurich). Ralf was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer.

This is the second year in a row that the ACM SIGPLAN Dissertation Award was given to an MPI-SWS student.

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Ralf Jung's thesis, entitled Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language, has been recognized with the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award. (The award this year was shared with Gagandeep Singh, a doctoral student at ETH Zurich). Ralf was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer.

This is the second year in a row that the ACM SIGPLAN Dissertation Award was given to an MPI-SWS student. Last year it was awarded to Filip Niksic for his thesis on Combinatorial Constructions for Effective Testing, supervised by Rupak Majumdar.

The award, first given in 2001, recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations in the area of Programming Languages.

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Ralf Jung receives ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

Ralf Jung's doctoral dissertation on "Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language" has received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention. The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is considered to be one of the most prestigious international dissertation awards in the area of computer science, and there are only two Honorable Mentions given for the award each year. The Honorable Mention Award comes with a prize of $10,000 and an invitation to accept the award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco.

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Ralf Jung's doctoral dissertation on "Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language" has received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention. The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is considered to be one of the most prestigious international dissertation awards in the area of computer science, and there are only two Honorable Mentions given for the award each year. The Honorable Mention Award comes with a prize of $10,000 and an invitation to accept the award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco.

Ralf's work has previously received the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Otto Hahn Medal, as well as being featured in the April 2021 issue of Communications of the ACM in an article entitled "Safe Systems Programming in Rust". For more details see the Saarland Informatics Campus press release.

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Arpan Gujarati receives 2021 ACM SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award

Arpan Gujarati's thesis, entitled  Towards “Ultra-Reliable" CPS: Reliability Analysis of Distributed Real-Time Systems, has been recognized with the 2021 ACM SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award. The award, first given in 2013, recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems, in the spirit and legacy of Dr. Paul Caspi’s work. Arpan was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Björn Brandenburg.

ETAPS dissertation award and CACM article for Ralf Jung and his work on Rust

Ralf Jung's doctoral dissertation on "Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language" has received the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2021. The award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the research areas in the scope of the ETAPS conferences, and has graduated in 2021 at a European academic institution. Ralf was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer.

A committee of international experts evaluated candidate dissertations with respect to originality,

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Ralf Jung's doctoral dissertation on "Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language" has received the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2021. The award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the research areas in the scope of the ETAPS conferences, and has graduated in 2021 at a European academic institution. Ralf was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer.

A committee of international experts evaluated candidate dissertations with respect to originality, relevance, and impact to the field, as well as the quality of writing. The committee found that Dr. Ralf Jung's dissertation is very well-written and makes several highly original contributions in the area of programming language semantics and verification. The committee was also particularly impressed by the dissertation for its technical depth, the quality and quantity of the associated published work, as well as its relevance and impact both in academia and industry.

Ralf's work on Rust was also featured in a recent Communications of the ACM article: Safe Systems Programming in Rust by Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Robbert Krebbers, and Derek Dreyer. The article appeared in the April 2021 issue of CACM, together with a short video about this work produced by ACM.

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Filip Niksic awarded ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Dissertation Award

November 18, 2020

Filip Niksic's thesis on "Combinatorial Constructions for Effective Testing" has won the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2020. This is an annual award given by ACM SIGPLAN for a doctoral dissertation in the field of programming languages. Filip was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar.

The award citation reads as follows: Soundness is at the core of most programming language verification techniques. On the other hand, random testing is one of the most commonly used techniques for analyzing software.

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Filip Niksic's thesis on "Combinatorial Constructions for Effective Testing" has won the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2020. This is an annual award given by ACM SIGPLAN for a doctoral dissertation in the field of programming languages. Filip was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Rupak Majumdar.

The award citation reads as follows: Soundness is at the core of most programming language verification techniques. On the other hand, random testing is one of the most commonly used techniques for analyzing software. Developing a theory of soundness for random testing is therefore a very important goal, but very few results existed before this thesis.Randomized techniques are seldom used in (sound) program analyses, which means that addressing the problem required the development of new ways to approaching it. Filip Niksic's thesis is among the first to apply deep techniques from randomized algorithms and combinatorics to the problem of understanding and explaining the effectiveness of random testing. Moreover, the theory helps with the design of new random testing approaches. The thesis addresses a hard problem, brining in novel theory from outside programming languages, and proving hard theorems. As scientists, when we see a phenomenon that we cannot immediately explain (in this case, the effectiveness of random testing), we should try to build a scientific explanation. For some problems, including random testing, it is unclear that one can actually formulate a precise theory, because the "real world" is extremely messy. The fact that Filip Niksic is able to formulate such problems precisely and prove nontrivial theorems about them is surprising and opens the door to a new field.

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Jonathan Mace receives Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Honorable Mention

October 23, 2018

MPI-SWS faculty member Jonathan Mace has received an honorable mention for the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Launched in 2013, the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (ACM SIGOPS) to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied. Only one winner is chosen annually, and this year, Jonathan Mace's dissertation received an Honorable Mention for the award.

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MPI-SWS faculty member Jonathan Mace has received an honorable mention for the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Launched in 2013, the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (ACM SIGOPS) to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied. Only one winner is chosen annually, and this year, Jonathan Mace's dissertation received an Honorable Mention for the award.

"Many tools for monitoring and enforcing distributed systems," Jonathan explains, "capture information about end-to-end executions by propagating in-band contexts." In his thesis---A Universal Architecture for Cross-Cutting Tools in Distributed Systems---he characterizes a broad class of such cross-cutting tools and extends these ideas to new applications in resource management and dynamic monitoring. Finally, he identifies underlying commonalities in this class of tools, and proposes an abstraction layering that simplifies their development, deployment, and reuse.

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Amaury Pouly receives Ackermann Award

Amaury Pouly, a postdoc in Joël Ouaknine's Foundations of Automatic Verification Group, has received the 2017 Ackermann Award for his PhD thesis, “Continuous-time computation models: From computability to computational complexity.” The Ackermann Award is an international prize presented annually to the author of an exceptional doctoral dissertation in the field of Computer Science Logic.

Amaury Pouly's thesis shows that problems which can be solved with a computer in a reasonable amount of time (more specifically problems which belong to the class P of the famous open problem “P = NP?”) can be characterized as polynomial length solutions of polynomial differential equations.

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Amaury Pouly, a postdoc in Joël Ouaknine's Foundations of Automatic Verification Group, has received the 2017 Ackermann Award for his PhD thesis, “Continuous-time computation models: From computability to computational complexity.” The Ackermann Award is an international prize presented annually to the author of an exceptional doctoral dissertation in the field of Computer Science Logic.

Amaury Pouly's thesis shows that problems which can be solved with a computer in a reasonable amount of time (more specifically problems which belong to the class P of the famous open problem “P = NP?”) can be characterized as polynomial length solutions of polynomial differential equations. This result paves the way for reformulating certain questions and concepts of theoretical computer science in terms of ordinary polynomial differential equations. It also revisits analog computational models and demonstrates that analog and digital computers actually have the same computing power, both in terms of what they can calculate (computability) and what they can solve in reasonable (polynomial) time.

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Sadegh Soudjani receives DIC Best PhD-Thesis Award

MPI-SWS postdoctoral fellow Sadegh Soudjani has been awarded the DISC Best PhD-Thesis Award for the best PhD thesis defended in 2014 in the Netherlands in the area of systems and control. Dr. Soudjani received the award for the excellent quality of his PhD Thesis "Formal Abstraction for Automated Verification and Synthesis of Stochastic Systems" for which he obtained the doctoral degree at Delft University of Technology in November.

Rijurekha Sen receives ACM-India Doctoral Dissertation Award

February 1, 2015

MPI-SWS postdoctoral fellow Rijurekha won the 2014 Best Doctoral Dissertation Award by ACM-India for her thesis titled "Different Sensing Modalities for Traffic Monitoring in Developing Regions" Dr. Sen recently joined the MPI-SWS Distributed Systems and Social Computing research groups.

Aaron Turon receives SIGPLAN Dissertation Award

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,

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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.

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Björn Brandenburg receives EDAA dissertation award

February 1, 2013

MPI-SWS faculty member Björn Brandenburg has won the 2012 EDAA Outstanding Dissertations Award in the category "New directions in embedded system design and embedded software", to be presented at the DATE 2013 conference in March. This marks the third award Brandenburg has received for his dissertation.

Björn Brandenburg receives North American dissertation award

December 1, 2012

Björn Brandenburg, an MPI-SWS faculty member, has been awarded the Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the area of mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering. The award—North America's most prestigious honor for doctoral dissertations—recognizes recent doctoral recipients who have already made unusually significant and original contributions to their fields.

Brandenburg's dissertation, "Scheduling and Locking in Multiprocessor Real-Time Operating Systems," was also selected for the 2012 Linda Dykstra Distinguished Dissertation Award,

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Björn Brandenburg, an MPI-SWS faculty member, has been awarded the Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the area of mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering. The award—North America's most prestigious honor for doctoral dissertations—recognizes recent doctoral recipients who have already made unusually significant and original contributions to their fields.

Brandenburg's dissertation, "Scheduling and Locking in Multiprocessor Real-Time Operating Systems," was also selected for the 2012 Linda Dykstra Distinguished Dissertation Award, which recognizes the best dissertation among all graduates in the fields of mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Ruzica Piskac wins Patrick Denantes Prize

September 1, 2012

Ruzica Piskac, an MPI-SWS faculty member, has been awarded the 2012 Patrick Denantes Prize for her dissertation titled "Decision Procedures for Program Synthesis and Verification." The prize is awarded annually to the most outstanding master's, doctoral or post-doctoral research project within the school of computer and communication sciences at EPFL.