Marta Kwiatkowska and Susan Murphy win Van Wijngaarden Awards 2021 for preventing software faults and for improving decision making in health

The Van Wijngaarden Awards 2021 are awarded to computer scientist Marta Kwiatkowska and mathematician Susan A. Murphy for the numerous and highly significant contributions they made to their respective research areas: preventing software faults and improving decision making in health. The five-yearly award is established by CWI, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, and is named after former CWI director Aad van Wijngaarden. The winners receive the prize during a festive soirée on 18 November in Amsterdam. Marta Kwiatkowska (University of Oxford) is a computer scientist who pioneered research on modelling, verification, and synthesis of probabilistic systems. She led the development of the highly influential PRISM probabilistic model checker, which is widely used for research and teaching and which has been downloaded over 80,000 times. In her research Kwiatkowska showed the relevance of PRISM by applying it in several areas, including ubiquitous computing, system biology, DNA computing, and most recently, safety for AI.