Berger Receives the ACM SIGPLAN PLDI Most Influential Paper Award for 2016

June 16, 2016

Emery Berger, professor of computer science, has received an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Programming Languages Design and Implementation (PLDI) Most Influential Paper Award for his 2006 paper, "DieHard: Probabilistic Memory Safety for Unsafe Languages," co-written with Benjamin Zorn of Microsoft Research.

The PLDI Most Influential Paper Award recognizes an academic paper that has been deemed to have had significant influence on the programming languages research community in the decade since it was published. The focus of the paper, DieHard, is an error-avoiding system that automatically prevents crashes, security vulnerabilities, and unpredictable behavior in programs written in languages prone to memory errors like C and C++. In addition to its impact on the research community, DieHard directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap.

Berger and Zorn received the award at PLDI's annual conference (for which he is also Program Chair), held June 13-17, 2016 in Santa Barbara, CA.

Congratulations, Emery!