The EATCS Award 2024  - Laudation for Samson Abramsky

The EATCS Award committee selects

Samson Abramsky

as the recipient of the 2024 EATCS Award

Samson Abramsky has been a research leader in the logic and semantics of computation over the past four decades. His work spans a broad range of topics centered around the theme of bringing categorical methods to computer science, consistently opening up new research directions. His early work on domain theory pioneered the application of Stone duality from category theory to the logic and semantics of computation. Other important contributions from this period are his work on the lazy lambda calculus, abstract interpretation, and concurrency theory. Samson's work on game semantics provided a new impetus to the field of programming language semantics by introducing interaction-based models for higher-order computation. This work offered deep new insights into the nature of state, control, and many other computational features; in particular it provided an order-extensional fully abstract model for sequential computation. Samson also pioneered a categorical approach to quantum foundations and information, showing that concepts from logic and programming language theory can be fruitfully applied to quantum processes. He continues to provide the community with insightful contributions; for example, his recent work on the pebbling comonad has opened up a new research direction by applying categorical methods to finite-model theory. Besides original research, he has also written and edited several influential expository and survey articles and texts on these topics.

The EATCS Awards Committee

Thomas Henzinger (chair)

Valerie King

Amos Fiat

The award will be presented at ICALP 2024, in Tallinn.

The EATCS annually honors a respected scientist from our community with this prestigious EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, to acknowledge extensive and widely recognized contributions to theoretical computer science over a life long scientific career (see http://eatcs.org/index.php/eatcs-award for more information, including the list of previous recipients).