Baris Kasikci has received the Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize 2016 for his PhD thesis Techniques for Detection, Root Cause Diagnosis, and Classification of In-Production Concurrency Bugs.

Concurrency bugs are at the heart of some of the worst software bugs. They can slow down software development by weeks or even months, as they are difficult to identify and fix.

Baris’ thesis introduces techniques to automatically detect concurrency bugs during production and identify the root causes of in-production failures – particularly those caused by concurrency bugs. It also explores a technique that automatically classifies a data race based on its potential consequence.

The thesis was developed in EPFL’s Dependable Systems Laboratory under George Candea. A toolchain built to implement the techniques demonstrated their effectiveness, accuracy and precision.