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Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing 2025

We are pleased to announce that the 2025 Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing is awarded to Sergio Rajsbaum from the Instituto de Matematicas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). Sergio has been a major contributor to the field of Distributed Computing since its early days, with numerous publications of breakthrough results. These include 17 papers in SIROCCO throughout the years.

Sergio has played a central role in developing the theory of distributed computing, in particular, in developing and using the topological approach as described in his "ACM Notable Books of the Year"-listed book "Distributed Computing through Combinatorial Topology", co-authored with Maurice Herlihy and Dmitry Kozlov. Along with many co-authors, Sergio has been a leading figure in advancing the basic wait-free asynchronous read/write shared memory model to t-resilient models, more powerful shared memory objects, synchronous or partially synchronous message-passing models, and dependent or Byzantine failures. He also introduced novel tasks like loop agreement and symmetry breaking and developed fundamental undecidability results on task solvability. A remarkable feature of Sergio’s research work is its breadth and the various bridges to other areas and application domains. Notable examples of the former are a suite of papers devoted to runtime verification, his work on interval linearizability, and his well-cited contributions to condition-based consensus and layered analysis. Among Sergio's interdisciplinary work are ground-breaking publications on simplicial epistemic multi-agent logic and contributions to robot coordination.

For his pioneering advancements in the theory of distributed computing, the 2025 Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing will hence be awarded to Sergio Rajsbaum at SIROCCO’25 (June 2-4, 2025) in Delphi, Greece.

The 2025 Award committee:

• Keren Censor-Hillel (Technion, Israel)
• Yuval Emek (Technion, Israel)
• Paola Flocchini (University of Ottawa, Canada)
• Merav Parter (Weizmann Institute, Israel)
• Christian Scheideler (University of Paderborn, Germany)