Awards - Scala 2017

The following papers were selected by the OOPSLA Program Committee and External Program Committee for distinguished paper awards:

Practical Initialization Race Detection for JavaScript Web Applications by Christoffer Quist Adamsen, Anders Møller, and Frank Tip
SQLizer: Query Synthesis from Natural Language by Navid Yaghmazadeh, Yuepeng Wang, Isil Dillig, and Thomas Dillig
Verifying Strong Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems by Victor B. F. Gomes, Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford
The Tensor Algebra Compiler by Fredrik Kjolstad, Shoaib Kamil, Stephen Chou, David Lugato, and Saman Amarasinghe
Robust and Compositional Verification of Object Capability Patterns by David Swasey, Deepak Garg, and Derek Dreyer
Sound Gradual Typing is Nominally Alive and Well by Fabian Muehlboeck and Ross Tate

The papers are listed in arbitrary order (i.e. there is no ranking)

Statistically rigorous Java performance evaluation by Andy Georges, Dries Buytaert, Lieven Eeckhout, OOPSLA 2007.
The paper by Georges et al. has been widely influential in Java performance evaluation. Before this paper, Java performance evaluation methodologies had varied widely, leading to difficulty in comparisons and often misleading conclusions. The authors survey several past studies, carefully discuss discrepancies in experimental and reporting methodologies, and expose the pitfalls of benchmarking approaches. The fundamental problem is that without an appropriate statistical analysis, it is difficult to tell whether reported measurements in the literature reflect significant distinctions or just random fluctuations. The paper proposes a statistically rigorous approach for experimental measurements in the Java setting, ways to mitigate uncertainty, and even new reporting techniques. The paper also introduced JavaStats, publicly available software that monitors the variability in measurements to determine how many measurements will be needed in all to reach a desired level of statistical confidence.

The following artifacts were selected to receive Distinguished Artifact Awards by the OOPSLA Artifact Evaluation Committee:

Static Stages for Heterogeneous Programming by Adrian Sampson, Kathryn S. McKinley, and Todd Mytkowicz
Verifying Strong Eventual Consistency in Distributed Systems by Victor B. F. Borges, Martin Kleppmann, Dominic P. Mulligan, and Alastair R. Beresford
A Simple Soundness Proof for Dependent Object Types by Marianna Rapoport, Ifaz Kabir, Paul He, and Ondřej Lhoták
DéjàVu: A Map of Code Duplicates on GitHub by Cristina Lopes, Petr Maj, Pedro Martins, Vaibhav Saini, Hitesh Sajnani, Di Yang, Jakub Zitny, and Jan Vitek
Understanding the use of lambda expressions in Java by Davood Mazinanian, Ameya Ketkar, Nikolaos Tsantalis, and Danny Dig

The artifacts are listed in arbitrary order (i.e. there is no ranking).

Living it up with a Live Programming Language by Sean McDirmidPaper. Onward! 2007
This paper brought the idea of Live Programming into focus by examining the necessary mechanisms, developing a good running example, displaying a contrarian attitude, and explaining it all with admirably clear writing.

Mirages–Behavioral Intercession in a Mirror-based Architecture by Stijn Mostinckx, Tom Van Cutsem, Stijn Timbermont, and Éric Tanter. DLS 2007
This paper combined the ideas of explicit mirrors for reflective introspection and modification with implicit mirrors for behavioral intercession. The work in this paper influenced and inspired the design of proxies in the JavaScript language, where it now has applications in areas such as security, testing, and virtualization of the DOM.

The competition winners were, in each category: