Fabrizio Montesi wins the EAPLS Best PhD Dissertation Award 2014

It is the great pleasure of the European Association on Programming Languages and Systems to announce the outcome of the EAPLS Best Dissertation Award 2014.

This award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the area of Programming Languages and Systems, and has graduated in the period from November 2013 to December 2014 at a European academic institute. The purpose of the award is to draw attention to excellent work, to help the career of the student in question, and to promote the research field as a whole.

The winner of this edition of the EAPLS Dissertation Award is

• Dr. Fabrizio Montesi
  IT University of Copenhagen
  

for his dissertation on

• Choreographic Programming

supervised by Marco Carbone. The winner was selected by a committee of 25 international experts. Details on the procedure can be found at http://eapls.org/pages/phd_award/. The candidate theses were judged on originality, impact, relevance, and quality of writing.

The jury concluded unanimously that Dr. Montesi's dissertation is an outstanding piece of work; it was ranked first amidst some very strong contenders. Some quotes from the jury's findings:

• In his thesis Montesi has shown to master fully a great number of subtle, fairly recent, advanced proof techniques. This thesis gives results interesting both for theoretical computer science, and practical programming. Unlike most computer scientists, Montesi excels in both systems and theory.
• The originality is outstanding, as also shown by the excellent venue of the papers on which the thesis is based. The impact of these papers is witnessed by the high number of citations.
• I like in particular the broad mix of contributions from the formal aspects to the application, which make this work attractive also as a bridge towards practice.
• I am impressed by the quality of the work. The theme is complex and not new, but the author brings many fresh results and ideas which bring a significative advance to the field, moving choreographies nearer to the point where they may become a practical way of programming safe distributed systems. The work is extremely complex, but the thesis is well written, which makes its easier to follow.
• Apart from being well written, the thesis is very innovative and fundamental. It may have a significant impact on the way distributed systems are programmed.
• The writing is extremely pleasant and the technical details are developed with both precision and clarity.
• The structure and writing is technically flawless, with a clear and well-motivated outline and local up-front contribution statements and conclusions that tie up the loose ends immediately.

We offer Dr. Montesi our heartfelt congratulations with his achievement. We are confident that it will be a sign of a long and distinguished scientific career.