Faculty Recruiting Support CICS

PLDI 2014 awards for Emery Berger and PLASMA students

Professor Emery Berger and members of his PLASMA research lab were well-represented in the list of award recipients at the 35th annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2014).

Berger and doctoral student John Vilk won the PLDI 2014 Distinguished Artifact Award for their work on Doppio, a runtime system that makes it possible to run general-purpose programming languages inside the browser, "breaking the browser language barrier" (doppiojvm.org). Only one of these awards is given per year. DoppioJVM, part of this work, is currently being used by a variety of projects, including codemoo.org (an educational website from the University of Illinois) to make it possible to run Java programs directly in any web browser, without the need to install a Java plug-in. Vilk presented the paper on this work during PLDI 2014 in June in Edinburgh.

Doctoral student Emma Tosch won the PLDI 2014 Student Research Competition for her work on programming and debugging surveys (SurveyMan). She will be advancing to the 2015 national student research competition. A technical paper describing this work will be appearing at OOPSLA 2014, a premier programming languages conference, in October.

In addition, a paper that describes a memory allocator based directly on Berger's Hoard memory allocator won the 2014 Most Influential PLDI Paper Award (a test of time award for a paper presented 10 years prior).