International double distinction in the field of programming languages

    June 23, 2022

    PRESS RELEASE

    DMST AUEB:
    International double distinction in the field of programming languages

    The awards "Distinguished Paper" and "Best Artifact" were won by the graduate of the Department of Management Science and Technology of Athenas University of Economics and Business Stefanos Chaliasos and the PhD candidate Thodoris Sotiropoulos, at the top conference in the field of programming languages "43rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation" (PLDI 2022), held in San Diego (USA), June 13-17, 2022.

    The award was for the paper "Stefanos Chaliasos, Thodoris Sotiropoulos, Diomidis Spinellis, Arthur Gervais, Benjamin Livshits, and Dimitris Mitropoulos, Finding typing compiler bugs, in Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI'22. ACM, June 2022" (https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523427), which was also attended by Professor Diomidis Spinellis (Department of DMST AUEB), Assistant Professor Arthur Gervais, (Imperial College), Associate Professor Benjamin Livshits (Imperial College) and Assistant Professor Dimitris Mitropoulos (Department of Business Administration of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens).

    The distinguished paper concerns an innovative method for the automatic detection of errors related to the implementation of type systems in compilers. The application of the method led to the finding of more than 150 confirmed bugs in the compilers of popular programming languages such as Java, Groovy and Kotlin. Finding and reporting bugs to compiler manufacturers has led to the correction of most of them, thus helping to improve the reliability of compilers, systems widely used by developers around the world. The implementation of the method is available as open source software on the website https://github.com/hephaestus-compiler-project/hephaestus.

    The research was carried out in the framework of the Business Analytics Laboratory (BALab), which is under the direction of Professor Diomidis Spinellis. The laboratory covers teaching and research needs in the field of "Business Analytics" and in particular in the following areas:

    • Methods, technologies and applications of data collection, processing, representation, modeling and analysis.
    • Software and data analysis applications related to the subject of the laboratory.
    • Data analysis systems and data analysis applications in the development and operation of all types of systems.
    • Methods, technologies and applications for representation and solving large-scale optimization problems.