Award given to outstanding doctoral dissertations whose results have been published at ETAPS.
The ETAPS International Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software Association has established a Doctoral Dissertation Award to promote and recognize outstanding dissertations in the research areas covered by the four main ETAPS conferences (ESOP, FASE, FoSSaCS, and TACAS).
Doctoral dissertations are evaluated with respect to originality, relevance, and impact to the field, as well as the degree of reproducibility (where this applies). The award winner will receive a monetary prize and will be recognized at the ETAPS Banquet.
Eligible for the award is any PhD student whose doctoral dissertation includes a publication at ETAPS or its satellite event and who completed their doctoral degree in the period from January 1st, 2024 to December 31st, 2024.
Award candidates should be nominated by their supervisor. Members of the Award Committee are not allowed to nominate their own PhD students for the award.
Nominations consist of a single PDF file (extension .pdf) containing:
All documents must be written in English. Nominations are welcome regardless of whether results that are part of the dissertation have been published at ETAPS.
Nominations should be submitted via EasyChair.
The deadline for nominations is January 15, 2025.
All questions about submissions should be emailed to the chair of the award committee, Caterina Urban.
Yotam Feldman’s PhD dissertation is a milestone in invariant-based verification of computer programs. Establishing deep and even surprising connections across very different computer science areas such as formal verification and learning theory, it made impressive and elegant theoretical contributions, opening the door for several future theoretical and practical developments. The thesis was supervised by Sharon Shoham and Mooly Sagiv.
Caterina Urban (chair), Nobuko Yoshida (representing ESOP), Reiko Heckel (representing FASE), Andrzej Murawski (representing FoSSaCS), Kim G. Larsen (representing TACAS), Marieke Huisman, Kaushik Mallik
Kaushik Malliks’ PhD thesis made impressive theoretical and algorithmic contributions towards advancing controller synthesis for cyber-physical systems. The guiding theme of Kaushik’s work can be seen as taking ideas from software model checking and applying them to the synthesis problem. This required surprisingly elegant and seemingly natural novel theoretical insights. The result are new algorithmic ideas based on abstraction, CEGAR, and assume-guarantee reasoning that not only lead to competitive tools that redefine the state of the art but also present new avenues for the synthesis of stochastic and concurrent systems. Beside the theoretical and practical advancements, Kaushik’s PhD thesis presents the results in a very clear way, providing thorough high-level intuitions and descriptions for the technical development.
Caterina Urban (chair), Nobuko Yoshida (representing ESOP), Mariëlle Stoelinga (representing FASE), Andrew Pitts (representing FoSSaCS), Holger Hermanns (representing TACAS), Marieke Huisman, Ralf Jung
The committee was very impressed by the results in Dr. Sebastian Wolff’s dissertation, which makes a landmark breakthrough in the verification of concurrent data structures. The committee also really appreciated that his dissertation both contains fresh theoretical insights and goes all the way to a tool that can verify practical data structures as well as to extensive and reproducible results.
Caterina Urban (chair), Nobuko Yoshida (representing ESOP), Mariëlle Stoelinga (representing FASE), Andrew Pitts (representing FoSSaCS), Holger Hermanns (representing TACAS), Marieke Huisman, Ralf Jung
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.
Caterina Urban (chair), Luís Caires (representing ESOP), Andrzej Wasowski (representing FASE), Andrew Pitts (representing FoSSaCS), Dirk Beyer (representing TACAS), Marieke Huisman, Oded Padon
Dr. Padon’s dissertation received the best marks among several truly excellent submissions. The committee found that his dissertation is extremely well-written and makes original, surprising, and practically useful contributions to the automated verification of distributed systems, which is a difficult and very relevant topic today. The committee was also extremely impressed by the quality and quantity of the published work associated with the dissertation as well as the practical integration of the results into tools widely used both in academia and industry.
Caterina Urban (chair), Amal Ahmed (representing ESOP), Dirk Beyer (representing TACAS), Andrew Pitts (representing FoSSaCS), Perdita Stevens (representing FASE), Marieke Huisman