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).