A number of awards are regularly presented at SIGPLAN-sponsored events, but are not awarded directly by SIGPLAN.
The ASPLOS Most Influential Paper Award recognizes a historical ASPLOS paper that has had major influence on the field. The Program Committee nominates highly influential papers from any ASPLOS conference that occurred ten or more conferences ago, with the final selection being made by the ASPLOS Steering Committee.
In recognition of the contributions to computer science that John Vlissides made during his lifetime, SIGPLAN has established the John Vlissides Award. The award is presented annually to a doctoral student participating in the OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium showing significant promise in applied software research. All doctoral candidates participating in the annual OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium are eligible. The award includes a prize of $2,000.
The John Vlissides Award was established by generous contributions from the following companies, individuals, and organizations: IBM, Addison-Wesley, William Pugh, and SIGPLAN.
Selection Committee
The selection committee consists of the following members:
The committee is chaired by the OOPSLA Program Chair. The OOPSLA Program Chair shall adjudicate conflicts of interest, appointing substitutes to the committee as necessary.
Rethinking the Library OS from the Top Down, ASPLOS 2011
Design and evaluation of a compiler algorithm for prefetching, ASPLOS 1992
A VLIW Architecture for a Trace Scheduling Compiler, ASPLOS 1987
The Cache Performance and Optimizations of Blocked Algorithms, ASPLOS 1991
Improving the Accuracy of Dynamic Branch Prediction Using Branch Correlation, ASPLOS 1992
Value Locality and Load Value Prediction, ASPLOS 1996
A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization, ASPLOS 2006
Citation:
Eduardo Geraldo’s PhD work combines static and dynamic analysis to develop a value-dependent approach to information flow control to enable the detection of information leaks in Java programs that if detected could compromise data confidentiality.
Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications
OceanStore: an architecture for global-scale persistent storage
Automatically characterizing large scale program behavior
Citation:
Silvia Grewe’s work aims to provide better automation of type soundness proofs for new languages, thus lowering the barrier to developing sound general-purpose and domain-specific languages. Theorem-proving systems are increasingly adept at automating proofs, and soundness proofs based on progress and preservation seem especially ripe for automation due to patterns that appear in the proofs, but theorem-proving systems currently lack tactics to directly support such proofs. Silvia is working to extract proof patterns and integrate them into theorem provers to make automation more effective and accessible.
Citation:
Chang Liu’s work explores programming language support for oblivious applications, an important dimension of security in the presence of side channels. His work bridges two disjoint efforts on opposite ends of the hardware-software design spectrum – oblivious RAM and oblivious algorithms – and adopts a language design approach to facilitate users in their development of efficient oblivious applications. The new language is endowed with a type system providing formal guarantees of obliviousness, and can support both sequential and parallel applications. The promising approach Chang proposed may significantly improve development productivity and performance of oblivious applications.
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Christopher Hall’s work explores the classic design tension between user friendly versus expert friendly user interface design as well as the classic design tension between binary versus printable data format design. His work sets out to expose both sets of design tensions as having the same cause and solution. Information representations and user interface architecture both lack a self descriptive capacity. By raising the common denominator of computing to a foundation that is metadata friendly, structured editing can place human-readable strings and graphical user interfaces on the same spectrum. Smoothing out the gradients of interacting with computation creates new opportunities for unifying software systems as a developer and having an outlet for accruing and applying computational literacy as an end-user.
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Zalia Shams’ work is motivated by the observation that software testing is frequently being added to programming courses at many schools, but current assessment techniques for evaluating student-written software tests are imperfect. Code coverage measures are typically used in practice, but that approach does not assess how much of the expected behavior is checked by the tests and sometimes overestimates the true quality of the tests. Running one student’s tests against others’ code (known as all-pairs testing) and mutation analysis are better indicators of test quality but both of them posed a number of practical obstacles to classroom use. Her proposal describes technical obstacles behind using these two approaches in automated grading. Zalia has provided novel and practical solutions to apply all-pairs testing and mutation analysis of student-written tests, especially in an automated grading context.
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The winner of the Vlissides award is Gustavo Soares of the Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil. His proposed thesis is entitled “Automated Behavioral Testing of Refactoring Engines”
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Hari Pyla’s work is motivated by the need to leverage concurrency to achieve performance, and the challenge of avoiding deadlocks in concurrent shared memory programs. He has introduced Sammati, a new approach that transparently and deterministically detects and recovers from deadlocks, without requiring modification to source code. This approach not only avoids errors, but also allows more effective composition of lock-based code. Hari’s system also supports coarse-grained speculative parallelism, supporting difficult-to-parallelize applications and achieving significant speedups in practice.
Citation:
Márcio Ribeiro’s research addresses the problem of maintaining software defined using “virtual separation of concerns.” The virtual separation of concerns technique presents software with features defined using code between #ifdef and #endif (as in the C preprocessor) to the programmer in a way that hides various features that are not of immediate interest. However, when maintaining such software, it is easy to break code in hidden features. The solution approach uses a specialized dataflow analysis that takes features and allowed feature combinations into account. The results of this analysis are used to warn the programmer if there are dependencies between the changed code and any hidden features. These ideas are being implemented in a tool that will allow independent development of parallel features.
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Tudor Dumitras’s research identifies and addresses the leading causes of both unplanned failures and planned downtime resulting from software upgrades in distributed systems. Traditional fault-tolerance approaches concentrate almost entirely on responding to, avoiding, or tolerating unexpected faults or security violations. However, scheduled events such as software upgrades account for most system unavailability and often introduce data loss or latent errors. Tudor defines three abstract properties required for improving the dependability of software upgrades. Building on empirically derived insights on current upgrade practices and problems, Tudor’s work harnesses the opportunities provided by emerging technologies such as cloud computing to simplify large-scale upgrades, to allow upgrades to be executed efficiently online, and to improve their dependability.
Citation:
Ciera Jaspan’s research targets the programming difficulties associated with using software frameworks. Plug-in writers need to satisfy a variety of framework constraints, and Ciera is directly motivated by the kinds of plug-in errors that frequently arise in today’s frameworks. She has defined a new abstraction for expressing framework constraints as well as lightweight annotations and an associated static analysis to enforce this abstraction. Ciera is focused on making the right tradeoffs to ensure her solution is useful in practice.