When I thought about what to say this morning, I found myself in the same situation I was in a few years ago, trying to figure out a good toast for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. I was at a loss about what to say until I was at a restaurant, eavesdropping on a young couple who were recounting events from their semi-delinquent teenage years. Finally, one of them said, ''The way I figure it, there are two things that determine what you become—your genes and your environment . . . and your parents are responsible for both of them.''
That took care of the toast, but in this case . . . well, I'll thank my parents for my genes, such as they are, but the environment was the Cornell Department of Computer Science and then the Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department, with one-year stays at the famous Batiment 8—Building 8—at INRIA, DIKU in Copenhagen, CNR in Pisa, and the University of Paris 7, thanks to visits arranged by Gilles Kahn, Gerard Huet, Bernard Lang, and Jean-Jacques Levy at INRIA, Neil Jones at DIKU, Antonella Bertolino at CNR, and Ahmed Bouajjani and Tayssir Touili at Paris 7.
I wouldn't be anything as a researcher or as a person without the experience I had at Cornell with Tim Teitelbaum. I talked about this experience in the interview Jean Yang did with me for her People of Programming Languages project, so I invite you to consult that.
Alan Demers and Bob Constable were also strong influences on me at Cornell.
At Wisconsin, I had excellent PL colleagues in Charles Fischer, Marv Solomon, Susan Horwitz, Jim Larus, Ras Bodik, and my current colleagues, Somesh Jha, Ben Liblit, Aws Albarghouthi, and Loris D'Antoni.
I've also been privileged to have excellent Ph.D. students: Wuu Yang, Phil Pfeiffer, Dave Binkley, Ramalingam, Manuvir Das, Mike Siff, Zhichen Xu, Dave Melski, Alexey Loginov, Denis Gopan, Gogul Balakrishnan, Akash Lal, Nick Kidd, Junghee Lim, Evan Driscoll, Aditya Thakur, Bill Harris, Venkatesh Srinivasan, and Tushar Sharma. Serving as their advisor is one of the achievements I am most proud of.
I've had several multi-year collaborations with colleagues at other universities. The over-a-decade-long one with Mooly Sagiv, Reinhard Wilhelm, and several of their students and mine was an incredible experience. I'm also grateful for collaborations with Stefan Schwoon and, most recently, Zak Kincaid.
Tim Teitelbaum and I joke that we started GrammaTech for the ''anecdotal value,'' but it has been stimulating in its own way. I am deeply in debt to Paul Anderson for getting me started on machine-code analysis.
And I'm also in debt to the program managers who have supported my work, including Ralph Wachter, Bill Scherlis, Howie Shrobe, Frank Anger, Helen Gill, Sol Greenspan, Karno Mertoguno, and Anindya Banerjee.
On a personal level, I had a wonderful personal as well as professional partner in Susan Horwitz, who passed away three and a half years ago. I'd like to thank Fran Wong who, with her energy and enthusiasm, has helped me build a new life with some new interests and new activities.
I'd like to leave you with one last thought. When I looked at the list of past recipients, after getting over my initial awe, what came to mind was the deep intellectual conversations I've been able to have with almost half of them. By ''intellectual conversation,'' I mean the exchange of ideas in their papers and mine. The conversations have gone both ways: my getting excited about Jeanne Ferrante's program dependence graphs, Ken Kennedy's dataflow-analysis algorithms, and the Cousots' methodology of abstract interpretation, and being able to advance them a bit. But it also involved getting Rod Burstall excited about building proof-checking editors, and Sue Graham interested in building interactive program-development environments. I hope that such conversations continue with some of you. I'm sure that it will go one way, because people will improve on the results that I've contributed to. But please come talk to me about your favorite topic; I'd love to have the light bulb go on inside my head, and get excited about a new subject.
Thank you again.
January 10, 2018
Los Angeles, CA