Conrad Watt wins the EAPLS Best Dissertation Award 2021

With great pleasure the European Association on Programming Languages and Systems announces the outcome of the EAPLS Best Dissertation Award 2021.

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 2021 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

 Conrad Watt (University of Cambridge)

for his PhD thesis entitled 

"Mechanising and evolving the formal semantics of WebAssembly: the Web’s new low-level language"

supervised by Professor Peter Sewell.

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 Conrad'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:

• This research has placed WebAssembly on a secure footing, which is essential for what is becoming a key Internet technology. 
• The research contributions and industrial impact are outstanding.
• Several flaws were identified in the language specification, which have now been corrected by the standards body. The proposed fuzzing oracle has been adopted by the Bytecode Alliance. 
• The effort made by the author on collaborating with various researchers and industry experts, providing understanding and knowledge, is commendable.
• The publication record is excellent.

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