George Candea wins highest honor in systems research
George Candea accepting the Mark Weiser Award © 2024 EPFL
IC Professor receives the prestigious ACM Mark Weiser Award for "innovation and impact in the development of reliable systems”.
This week, at the 30th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Austin, Texas (USA), Prof. George Candea received the 2024 Mark Weiser Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS). The award recognizes Prof. Candea's contributions to systems research over two decades of activity in the field.
At EPFL, Prof. Candea heads the Dependable Systems Laboratory, where he works on the fundamentals, techniques, and tools necessary for building computer systems that are safe and predictable.
In presenting the award, the chair of the selection committee quoted from the support letters sent in by luminaries in the field: "[George Candea] is a true scientist, whose work is always grounded in rigorous empiricism" and "has a willingness to take on hard problems, and yet comes up with novel and meaningful solutions".
In accepting the award, Prof. Candea credited his students, postdocs, collaborators, and advisors for the celebrated research results. "I am truly humbled by this award. It is a testament to all the great people who have inspired me, created opportunities for me, shaped me as a researcher, and worked with me on so many interesting research problems."
In the 23-year history of the ACM Mark Weiser Award, this is the first time that it has been presented to a faculty member for work done at a European university.
The award is named after Mark Weiser, known for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing. More broadly, he is viewed as a visionary and computer pioneer and his ideas have influenced many of the world’s leading computer scientists.