AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners

The Senior Prize is awarded to Mira Mezini, TU Darmstadt

Over the last 30 years, Mira Mezini has made outstanding contributions in the fields of Programming Languages and Software Engineering, on a diverse range of topics including modularization, software product lines, distributed programming, static analysis, type systems and automatic differentiation, to name but a few. Prof. Mezini is particularly well known for her pioneering work on aspect-oriented programming and has solved important open problems related to the interplay between aspect orientation and module systems. Prof. Mezini also led breakthrough work on automated code completion, providing an early use of data mining to allow code completion to go beyond recommendations purely based on static type information, leading to techniques that have been adopted in the world’s most widely used integrated development environments.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Amir Shaikhha, University of Edinburgh

Amir Shaikhha is known for his pioneering interdisciplinary work, spanning programming language design, compiler construction, and data management for AI and machine learning. His work is deeply grounded in theoretical foundations and has already made a substantial impact on both the PL and database communities. His early career achievements are exceptional: his PhD thesis, which received both a Google award and a thesis distinction award, set a remarkably high standard from the outset. His consistent record of high-quality publications in the most prestigious PL and database venues (including ECOOP) further attests to his research independence. His work has also garnered best paper, most reproducible, and most influential paper awards as well as best reviewer award.

The Test-of-Time Award

The 2025 Test of Time Award for papers published at ECOOP 2005 goes to ‘Towards type inference for JavaScript’ by Christopher Anderson, Paola Giannini, and Sophia Drossopoulou. This paper is amongst the most cited papers of that edition and remains consistently cited since 2005, demonstrating that the contributions have lasting value. Another fact that bears witness to the generality and quality of the contributions in this paper is that it has been cited many times recently in papers about a different language than JavaScript, namely Python.