Two Princeton Papers Recognized as ACM SIGPLAN Research Highlights

In September 2008, ACM SIGPLAN, the ACM chapter dedicated to programming languages and compilers, nominated five research papers for consideration as "research highlights" to appear in Communications of the ACM. These five papers were selected from amongst all papers appearing at the top programming language and compilers conferences over the past 3 years. The selection committee was composed of the current and past ACM SIGPLAN chairs and the program chairs of the top SIGPLAN conferences. Remarkably, two of the five papers were from the Princeton computer science department:

"The next 700 data description languages" appeared at POPL 06 and was co-authored by Kathleen Fisher (AT&T Research), Yitzhak Mandelbaum, and David Walker. It formed the centerpiece of Yitzhak Mandelbaum's 2007 Princeton Ph.D. thesis. Yitzhak has since been hired by AT&T research and continues his work on programming languages for data processing at AT&T.

"Fault-Tolerant Typed Assembly Language" appeared at PLDI 07 and was co-authored by Frances Perry, Lester Mackey, George A. Reis, Jay Ligatti, David I. August, and David Walker. The theoretical components of this paper formed the core of Frances Perry's 2008 Ph.D. thesis, while the implementation components were analyzed in George A. Reis' 2008 Ph.D. thesis. Both Frances and George are continuing their research after graduation at Google. Lester Mackey, an exceptional undergraduate from Princeton, is now in graduate school at Berkeley and Jay Ligatti, another former Princeton Ph.D., is now faculty at the University of South Florida.

The formal nominations may be found here: http://www.sigplan.org/CACMPapers.htm