Prof. Jeannette Wing, professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (US), has been awarded the FME Fellowship 2024. The Fellowships are awarded every three years in recognition of technical breakthroughs and pioneering work in advancing, applying, and promoting mathematically rigorous methods for the design of computing systems.
Prof. Jeannette Wing receives the FME 2024 Fellowship.
The call for nominations was issued in April 2023, and on 13 April 2024 this process was concluded. In a ceremony at the 24th International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2024), Prof. Wing was announced as being the forth Fellow of Formal Methods Europe. After Prof. Ana Cavalcanti, the Chair of FME, introduced the new FME Fellow and explained the selection process, Prof. Jeannette Wing shared her insights in a talk with the title “The 2024 FME Fellowship Acceptance Speech” about her work and scientific achievements. At the end of the ceremony, Prof. Wing was presented with a certificate and medal.
The FME Awards Committee motivated its decision as follows:
For her outstanding contributions to the theory, advancement, and adoption of formal methods in industry for nearly 40 years, we present Prof. Jeannette Wing, the 2024 FME Fellow. She has made a number of long-lasting contributions to the theoretical foundations of formal software design.
Prof. Wing has made a number of long-lasting contributions to the theoretical foundations of formal software design. She is well-known for her seminal work on linearisability, a formal notion of correctness for concurrent programs that is now considered one of the fundamental models of consistency in distributed systems. She is also recognised for her work on a formal notion of behavioral subtyping, also famously known as the Liskov substitution principle. These works on linearisability and subtyping have had significant impact on industry. The concepts are regularly taught and included as part of standard curricula for distributed systems and object-oriented programming.
She was also one of the original contributors to Larch, which has played a significant role in developing formal methods in software engineering, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. It influenced later specification languages and verification tools, particularly, in its approach to modularity and use of formal interfaces between components. VDM, CASL, OBJ, B, Alloy, PVS, and Spec# are examples of notations that incorporate some of Larch’s concepts.
Prof. Wing has also made significant contributions to the use of formal methods in security. She created the concept of attack graphs as a formal representation of attacks on computer systems and developed techniques for automatically generating attack graphs from formal system models. She was one of the first to propose a formal definition of an attack surface and influenced the design of the Attack Surface Analyzer tool at Microsoft. This is a security tool that reports on potential security vulnerabilities arising from software installation and configuration and has been in use since 2012.
In addition to her theoretical contributions, Prof. Wing has been instrumental in raising awareness of formal methods and encouraging its adoption in industry. Her survey papers on formal methods remain some of the most well-cited papers introducing the research field to a more general Computer Science audience. Her essay Computational Thinking, published in 2006, is credited with helping to establish the centrality of Computer Science to problem solving in other disciplines.
Prof. Wing was Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation in the United States of America. In that position, she created the Expeditions in Computing program, which provided funding for large-scale, ambitious research projects. Some of these projects have contributed major breakthroughs in formal methods.
As a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research between 2013 and 2017, Prof. Wing led the operations of its research labs worldwide, some of which have been at the forefront of the formal-methods research in industry. While at Microsoft, she led efforts to integrate research results into practice, including secure computation for cloud computing, now part of Azure Confidential Computing, and privacy-compliance checking tools.
Prof. Wing has been recognised with distinguished service awards from the Computing Research Association and the Association for Computing Machinery. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.