Professor Melliar-Smith and colleagues at SRI International were given the prestigious 2014 Jean-Claude Laprie Award for their Software-Implemented Fault-Tolerant (SIFT) computer for aircraft flight control.
The award is based on their paper — J.H. Wensley, L. Lamport, J. Goldberg, M.W. Green, K.N. Levitt, P.M. Melliar-Smith, R.E. Shostak, C.B. Weinstock, “SIFT: The Design and Analysis of a Fault-Tolerant Computer for Aircraft Control”, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol.66, no.10, 1978, pp.1240-1255.
The award is given annually since 2012 by the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance, in honor of Jean-Claude Laprie (1944-2010) and, according to its charter, intends to “recognize outstanding papers that have significantly influenced the theory and/or practice of dependable computing”. This year’s award will be presented at the IEEE/IFIP Dependable Systems and Networks Conference (DSN) on June 23-26, 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia.