The "Distinguished Paper" and "Best Artifact" awards were won by the graduate of the Department of Administrative Science and Technology (DET) of the Athens University of Economics and Business (OPA) Stefanos Haliasos and the PhD candidate Thodoris Sotiropoulos, at the top conference of the Programming Languages Branch “43rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation” (PLDI 2022), held in San Diego (USA), on 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), in which Professor Diomidis Spinellis (DET OPA Department), Assistant Professor Arthur Gervais, (Imperial College), Associate Professor Benjamin Livshits ( Imperial College) and Assistant Professor Dimitris Mitropoulos (Department of Business Administration and Organizations of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens).
The distinguished work 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 at https://github.com/hephaestus-compiler-project/hephaestus.
The research was carried out in the framework of the BALab Business Analytics Laboratory, 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 collections, processing, representation, modeling and Data Analysis.
- Software Applications and analysisof data related to the subject of the workshop.
- Data analysis systems and applications of data analysis in development and mode all kinds of systems.
- Methods, technologies and applications for representation and solution of large-scale optimization problems.