Shavit Wins Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

Nir Shavit, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a principal investigator at CSAIL, has been awarded the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. Shavit was honored along with Dan Touitou for their paper “Software Transactional Memory.”

The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is named for Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, a pioneer in the area of distributed computing. The prize is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and practice of distributed computing have been evident for at least a decade. The Prize is sponsored jointly by the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC).
 
Shavit’s research focuses on developing techniques for designing, implementing, and reasoning about multiprocessors, in particular concurrent data structures for multicore machines. He received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1986, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990.
 
For more on Shavit’s work, please visit: http://www.csail.mit.edu/user/2590.