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UTCS Associate Professor William Cook has won the prestigious 2014 Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize. Cook was awarded the Senior Prize for his contributions to the theory and practice of object-oriented programming. Cook currently teaches Programming Languages and his research focuses on improving the ability of programming languages to facilitate the development of efficient and maintainable software. 

The AITO Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard prize, established in 2005, is awarded to two individuals each year who have made significant technical contributions to the field of object-orientation. Work selected for the prize must be in the spirit of the pioneer conceptual and/or implementation work of Dahl and Nygaard, which shaped our present view of programming and modeling, now known as object-orientation.

The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prizes are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, two pioneers in the area of programming and simulation. Their foundational work on object-oriented programming, made concrete in the Simula language, is one of the most important inventions in software engineering. Their key ideas were expressed already around 1965, but took over 20 years to be absorbed and appreciated by the broader software community. After that, object-orientation has profoundly transformed the landscape of software design and development techniques. It was a great loss to our community that both Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard passed away in 2002. In remembrance of their scholarship and enthusiastic encouragement of young researchers, in 2004 AITO established a prize to be awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential for following in the footsteps of these two pioneers.

AITO (Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets) is a non-profit association registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. The purpose of the Association is to promote the advancement of research in object-oriented technology, primarily in Europe, in particular through the organization of the annual European Conference for Object-Oriented Programming(ECOOP). In addition, AITO Co-Sponsors Agile Development, The Conference and backed 1st International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development.

AITO (Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of object technology. As of March 2014, it has 41 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul. For further information, visit www.aito.org.