Amir Kafshdar Goharshady wins the EAPLS Best Dissertation Award 2020

With great pleasure the European Association on Programming Languages and Systems announces the outcome of the EAPLS Best Dissertation Award 2020.

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 2020 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 Best Dissertation Award is

Amir Kafshdar Goharshady (Institute of Science and Technology Austria)

for his PhD thesis entitled 

"Parameterized and Algebro-geometric Advances in Static Program Analysis"

supervised by Professor Krishnendu Chatterjee.

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

The jury concluded that Amir's dissertation is an outstanding piece of work; it was considered the best amongst some very strong contenders. A summary of the jury's findings:

• The thesis explores a range of program analysis and verification problems  using novel approaches. Each chapter analyses a problem using an algebraic/geometric formulation as a new perspective and gains significant results.
• The author addresses a class of relevant problems leveraging non-elementary mathematical approaches and presents accurate complexity analyses.
• The work is impressive in depth and in breadth.
• Not only theoretical results are obtained but these are backed up by practical experiments.
• Significant improvement over the state-of-the-art in static analysis.
• The results obtained in this thesis are remarkable and have been published in competitive venues. 
  

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