The winners of this year's Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science, presented annually by Carnegie Mellon University in conjunction with the Tokyo University of Technology, have been announced.

Won by Barbara Liskov, a pioneer in programming languages and distributed systems, and Scott Klemmer, whose human-centered approach is changing the way online systems are designed.

The prizes are endowed by Japanese entrepreneur and education advocate Koh Katayanagi, who founded Tokyo University of Technology and several technical institutions in Japan and were inaugurated in 2007.

Barbara Liskov, pioneer in programming languages and distributed systems who is currently Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and head of the programming methodology group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, will receive the Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence. This award recognizes an established researcher with a record of outstanding, sustained achievement and includes a $10,000 honorarium was won at the most recent previous presentation by Donald Knuth.

Liskov's work has made software more reliable and easier to maintain. Among her contributions is the Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP), formalized in 1994, which characterizes when it is safe to substitute an object of a subtype for an object of the parent type, thus preventing strange behaviors when the program is run.

Scott Klemmer, associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Group, has been awarded the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize, which includes a $5,000 honorarium. Klemmer is best known for his work investigating how software tools can increase the quality of interface design and programming, a human-centered approach that is changing the way online systems are designed.

More information about the prize, its winners and abstracts of the lectures given at their award ceremonies describing the work being recognized can be found on the Katayanagi Prize website.

See also the Carnegie Mellon announcement  for dates of this year's public lectures given by the prize winners and at which they will accept their prizes.

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