AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners

The Senior Prize is awarded to Peter Müller, ETH Zürich

Over many years, Peter Müller has made fundamental and sustained contributions to the practical deductive verification of imperative, object-oriented, and modern systems programs. He is best known for leading the development of Viper, a highly influential intermediate verification language and toolchain that has enabled modular, automated reasoning based on separation logic and related techniques. Through Viper and the tools built on top of it, Peter and his collaborators have brought sound verification to real programming languages including Rust, Go, Python or Java making verification more accessible to software developers while advancing the state of the art in both theory and practice. His work has had broad impact on the programming languages and formal methods communities, and his leadership, mentorship, and long-standing service have further strengthened the field.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Yizhou Zhang, University of Waterloo

Yizhou Zhang is recognized for a series of original and influential contributions at the intersection of programming languages, mechanized metatheory, and effectful programming. He introduced object-oriented ideas, most notably family polymorphism, into interactive theorem provers, yielding proof languages with a new level of extensibility that scales from mechanized metatheory to full compiler verification. He also pioneered lexical effect handlers, establishing key design principles and implementation techniques that have since shaped subsequent systems. Together with important contributions to the semantics and implementation of probabilistic programming languages, Yizhou’s work shows exceptional depth, creativity, and independence, marking him as a rising leader in programming languages research.

Keynotes

2025, Bergen Mira Mezini (senior prize), and Amir Shaikhha (junior prize)

2024, Vienna Rachid Guerraoui (senior prize), and Alvin Cheung (junior prize)

2023, Seattle Sophia Drosspoulou (senior prize), and Heather Miller (junior prize)

2022, Berlin Dan Ingalls(senior prize), and Magnus Madsen (junior prize)

2021, Aarhus Kim Bruce (senior prize), and Karim Ali (junior prize)

2020, Berlin Jan Vitek (senior prize), and Jonathan Bell (junior prize)

2019, London Laurie Hendren (senior prize), and Ilya Sergey (junior prize)

2018, Amsterdam Lars Bak (senior prize), and Guoqing Harry Xu (junior prize)

2017, Barcelona Gilad Bracha (senior prize), and Ross Tate (junior prize)

2016, Rome James Noble (senior prize), and Emina Torlak (junior prize)

2015, Prague Bjarne Stroustrup (senior prize), and Alexander J. Summers (junior prize)

2014, Uppsala William Cook (senior prize), Robert France (senior prize), and Tudor Gîrba (junior prize)

2013, Montpellier Oscar Nierstrasz (senior prize) and Matthew Parkinson (junior prize)

2012, Beijing Gregor Kiczales (senior prize) and Tobias Wrigstad (junior prize)

2011, Lancaster Craig Chambers (senior prize) and Atsushi Igarashi (junior prize)

2010, Maribor Doug Lea (senior prize) and Erik Ernst (junior prize)

2009, Genoa David Ungar (senior prize)

2008, Paphos Akinori Yonezawa (senior prize) and Wolfgang De Meuter (junior prize)

2007, Berlin Luca Cardelli (senior prize) and Jonathan Aldrich (junior prize)

2006, Nantes Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and (posthumously) John Vlissides

2005, Glasgow Bertrand Meyer (senior prize) and Gail Murphy (junior prize)