Distributed Computing Column 72: Annual Review 2018

Abstract

As with prior December issues, this issue is devoted to a review of notable events related to distributed computing that occurred during the year. First, congratulations to Bowen Alpern and Fred Schneider, winners of the 2018 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for their paper \De ning Liveness"! Their paper appeared in Information Processing Letters in October 1985. The prize is jointly sponsored by ACM and EATCS, and is given alternately at PODC1 and DISC2; this year it was given at PODC. This paper formally de ned liveness properties of concurrent and distributed algorithms for the rst time and also proved that every trace property is the conjunction of a safety property and a liveness property. The full citation can be found at http://www.podc.org/dijkstra/2018-dijkstra-prize/. I am delighted to include in this column the text of the remarks that Fred and Bowen gave at PODC when the award was presented to them.