29 April 2010

Dr Joël Ouaknine of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory and Professor John Reynolds, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University have been named as this year’s recipients of the Roger Needham Award and Lovelace Medal respectively.

The Lovelace Medal and Roger Needham Award, sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge, are presented annually by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in recognition of contributions made by individuals to the development of IT.

Joël Ouaknine is considered one of the most exciting and productive theoretical computer scientists working today. He is recognised as one of the most innovative young computer scientists in the UK, who has made a number of seminal and mathematical contributions to the field of timed systems modelling and analysis.

Joël is one of a handful of main theoretical contributors to the advancement of two of the most important directions in system modelling and verification, namely, the analysis of real-time systems and of stochastic systems. Much of his work has been carried out in collaboration with Dr James Worrell, also at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory.

His results will pave the way towards applying algorithmic formal methods such as model checking, which have already found great success in hardware design, also to the design of real-time and embedded software systems.  Such systems control, in more or less hidden ways, much of our daily lives, and their reliability is of tremendous societal concern. 

Dr Andrew Herbert, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge: “Joël’s work and contribution to IT, including the important results and contributions to our understanding of timed and similar systems, thoroughly merit the Roger Needham Award.”

Professor John Reynolds has been given the Lovelace Medal in recognition of his work of the last four decades and his contribution to the theory of programming languages. Thirty-six years ago, he was the co-discoverer (along with Jean-Yves Girard) of the polymorphic lambda calculus. This calculus encapsulates the key idea of data abstraction using just five constructs, and underlies all work on the theory of typed programming languages published today. It inspired the current systems of generics in Java and C#, two of the most widely used programming languages.

Just a few of John’s other projects include parametricity, subtyping, definitional interpreters, defunctionalisation, overloading, functor semantics, and separation logic.

Each of these has lead to practical application in unexpected places, including web applications, and the SLAyer tool developed by Microsoft Research to validate security properties of Windows software.

David Clarke, Chief Executive Officer, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, says: “I’m delighted to announce John Reynolds as the worthy recipient of the Lovelace Medal given in recognition of outstanding contributions to IT in the name of Ada Lovelace. John’s work and ideas underlie the daily work of thousands of developers who have probably never heard his name - I hope this medal will go some way towards changing this.”

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