Professor Nobuko Yoshida receives Most Influential POPL Paper Award

The prestigious award is presented annually to the authors of a paper published 10 years prior, and is judged by its influence over the past decade.

The paper Multiparty Asynchronous Session Types by Kohei Honda, Nobuko Yoshida, and Marco Carbone, was originally published in Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) 2008. The Selection Committee, consisting of high profile members of ACM SIGPLAN, recognised the paper as the Most Influential POPL Paper 2018.

When accepting the award on his co-authors behalf, at the SIGPLAN Awards, Marco Carbone outlined their thanks to both the Session Types community and their industrial partners. The full acceptance speech is availabe to view online.

The groundbreaking paper recognised that communication was becoming one of the central elements in software development. It focussed specifically on session types: a type-based framwork for codifying communication structures and verifying protocols in concurrent, message-passing programs. 

Previously, session types could only model binary (two-party) protocols. However this paper generalised the theory to the multiparty case with asynchronous communications, preventing deadlock and commuication errors in more sophisticated communication protocols involving any number (two or more) of participants. The central idea was to introduce global types, which describe multiparty conversations from a global perspective and provide a means to check protocol compliance.

This work has inspired numerous authors to to build on its pioneering foundations in the session types community and has intiated many applications of multiparty session types in programming languages and tools. it has also influenced other areas of research, such as software contracts, runtime verification and hardware specifications.

Nobuko Yoshida is a Professor of Computing in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. She has applied session types to Web services and programming languages, and introduced multiparty session types. Based on Multiparty session types, she established JBoss Red Hat Scribble project. She is an editor of  ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Acta Informatica, Journal of Logical Algebraic Methods in Programming (JLAMP) and Mathematical Structures in Computer Science (MSCS)  and the chief editor of The Computer-aided Verification and Concurrency Column for EATCS Bulletin.