Alexey Gotsman received the best paper award at The 23rd International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2012). The paper, “Linearizability with Ownership Transfer”, was co-authored by Hongseok Yang (Oxford University).
Linearizability is a commonly accepted notion of correctness for libraries of concurrent algorithms. The paper generalizes this notion to the setting of common programming languages, where libraries and their clients can communicate via the heap, transferring the ownership of data structures, and can even run in a shared address space without any memory protection.
