MEng student awarded Microsoft Prize and Distinguished project award

MEng Project Winner will be presented at PPoPP'22

Zak Cutner’s MEng final year project 2020/2021 Safe Session-Based Asynchronous Coordination in Rust‌ supervised by Nobuko Yoshida has received the Microsoft Prize in July 2021, as well as a Distinguished project award, which rewards outstanding final year undergraduate individual projects. After his project, in order to complete and publish his project, Zak worked for a summer internship under Yoshida's supervision.

His first paper, Safe Session-Based Asynchronous Coordination in Rust written with his co-author (Nobuko Yoshida) was accepted by the COORDINATION conference, where Zak is the first corresponding author. The paper is formally supported work -- ensuring a safety and deadlock-freedom of modern programming in Zak based on a multiparty session type theory.

He published a second paper Deadlock-Free Asynchronous Message Reordering in Rust with Multiparty Session Types (co-authored by Nobuko Yoshida and Martin Vassor), to be published at ACM Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2022 in April 2022 further studies asynchronous message reordering in the framework. His tool was accepted by Artifact Evaluation, obtaining Available, Reproduced and Reusable badges.

His supervisor, Nobuko Yoshida commend's Zak’s hard work to bring this project ahead from the MEng final year project to a peer reviewed paper at a prestigious conference. He published the first paper during Spring term. Then he led and took initiative over this work during Summer term and his summer internship.

He not only developed a new tool, but also developed new algorithms to check message reordering and proved correctness. He then compared his algorithms with other Rust implementations and tools.

This is the second conference paper that Nobuko published based on the MEng individual project where the student himself is the first author. The publication includes a software artifact that implements the system described in the paper. The artifact was awarded all three available badges, for being available, reproducing the results on the paper, and being reusable.

Currently, this project continues and is being extended by a new MEng final year project student.

Zak is currently working at Cloudflare, UK.