And the award goes to...

Google's very own Tushar Chandra along with his coauthors, Vassos Hadzilacos, and Sam Toueg, received the prestigious Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing conference in Zürich. This award is given for outstanding papers that have had great impact on the theory and practice of distributed computing for over a decade.

Their papers introduced and precisely characterized the notion of unreliable failure detection in a distributed system:

• Tushar D. Chandra and Sam Toueg. "Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems," Journal of the ACM, 43(2):225-267, 1996.
  (The first version appearing in the Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1991.)
• Tushar D. Chandra, Vassos Hadzilacos and Sam Toueg. "The Weakest Failure Detector for Solving Consensus," Journal of the ACM, 43(4):685-722, 1996.
  (The first version appearing in the Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1992.)

Tushar currently works on large-scale machine learning and distributed systems at Google.

You can find more information about the award and the papers here.

Congratulations to Tushar, Vassos, and Sam!