ACM SIGPLAN Dissertation Award for Benjamin Bichsel
Benjamin Bichsel, a doctoral student in the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab, has been honoured with the prestigious ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award in the area of programming languages. Congratulations!
Doctoral student Benjamin Bichsel has been awarded the ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award, which is presented annually to the author of an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the field of programming languages. Bichsel's thesis "High-Level Quantum Programming" is honoured for its significant contributions to the emerging domain of quantum computing, intending to make quantum programming easier, provably safer, and more accessible. In his dissertation, the doctoral student tackles two key challenges in quantum programming: uncomputation and simulation. The thesis introduces a new, high-level quantum programming language called Silq as well as a new framework for quantum simulation, which uses abstract interpretation to trade off precision for efficiency. Overall, the thesis combines a deep insight into the nature of quantum computing with advanced programming language techniques, such as (linear) type systems and abstract interpretation. It is worth mentioning, that Benjamin Bichsel's work has already had significant impact: the Silq language is currently being used in teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and in a textbook on quantum computing. Big congratulations!
About SIGPLAN: The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) explores programming language concepts and tools, focusing on design, implementation, practice, and theory. Its members are programming language developers, educators, implementers, researchers, theoreticians, and users. SIGPLAN bestows awards on an annual basis to recognise service and achievements in the programming language community.
Benjamin Bichsel is currently doing his doctorate in the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab, under the supervision of Professor Martin Vechev. He also obtained his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Department of Computer Science from ETH Zurich.
In 2018, he received the Willi Studer Prize for best Master’s degree in computer science, and in 2023, he was awarded the ETH Medal for his outstanding dissertation.