Honorary doctorate to Maurice Herlihy

During USI's 29th Dies academicus, Maurice Herlihy, Professor at Brown University, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Informatics with the distinction: "For fundamental contributions, both practical and theoretical, to concurrent and distributed systems programming, including his pioneering work on consistency models for shared memory and the development of innovative concurrent programming techniques that have been widely adopted in industrial practice".

Laudatio for Maurice Herlihy

Prof. Marc Langheinrich
Dean of the Faculty of Informatics

"Computers are becoming progressively faster each year. What is perhaps less well known is that, over the past 15 to 20 years, most of these improvements can be attributed not to faster chips, but to a process called concurrency. Concurrency involves multiple units working in parallel on the same task. This parallelisation requires careful coordination among the various computational units to ensure they do not interfere with one another.

Throughout his extensive career, Professor Maurice Herlihy, who received our Faculty's honorary doctorate, has made fundamental contributions that significantly enhance the reliability and capabilities of concurrent programming.

Effective concurrent programming is a delicate balancing act. On one hand, programs need to execute as many parallel operations as possible to maximise the hardware's capabilities. On the other hand, without proper synchronisation, these parallel operations can interfere with one another, causing destructive conflicts that can undermine the work completed and compromise the overall computation. The problem is that synchronisation reduces the possibilities of parallelisation, because some parts of the programme have to wait for others to complete. Prof. Herlihy contributed the concept of wait-free synchronisation. As the name implies, this type of synchronisation minimises or eliminates waiting and operates on the principle that it is sometimes better to "ask for forgiveness than for permission." With wait-free synchronisation, an operation proceeds without blocking, operating under the optimistic assumption that it will not conflict with other operations. If this assumption proves incorrect, the synchronisation protocol steps in to resolve the inconsistencies and attempts the operation again.

This is just one of his many ideas that have decisively influenced virtually the entire field of informatics as we know it today. By enabling the development of programming techniques that are both efficient and correct, Prof. Herlihy's work has had a fundamental impact not only on the academic and professional community but also on our society in general.

By awarding an Honorary Doctorate, Università della Svizzera italiana, at the proposal of the Faculty of Informatics, wishes to honour Prof. Maurice Herlihy of Brown University "for his fundamental contributions, both practical and theoretical, to the programming of concurrent and distributed systems, including his pioneering work on shared memory consistency models and the development of innovative concurrent programming techniques that have been widely adopted in industrial practice."