Prof. Martin Vechev honoured with ACM Young Researcher Award

Prof. Martin Vechev is the head of our Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab at the Department of Computer Science. The ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award is given out anually to recognise "outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages" – this year to Martin Vechev. The award is named after Robin Milner who won the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computer science) in 1991. The award committee describes the computer scientist as a " prolific researcher who has made major contributions to many areas of programming languages" and has further words of praise for the researcher:

"Martin Vechev is a pioneer who is often one of the first in the PL community to move into a new area. He is particularly well known for his seminal papers and tools at the interface of programming languages and machine learning. An example tool is JSNice, which deobfuscates JavaScript code by learning a probabilistic graphical model from a large corpus of programs, which is then used to predict improved variable names and perform statistical type inference. Another example at this interface is his work on using abstract interpretation for proving safety properties of deep neural networks, such as robustness. His many other contributions include significant advances in concurrent memory management, synthesis of synchronization code for concurrent programs, and efficient program analysis."

Tailwind for young explorers

The Robin Milner Young Researcher Award is given by ACM SIGPLAN to recognize outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages. Individuals are eligible if their computer-related professional career (graduate school or full-time employment, whichever began first) started no earlier than 20 years prior to the nominations deadline.