IT´s former PhD student Amaury Pouly won the Ackerman Award 2017 for his thesis “Continuous-time computation models: From computability to computational complexity”. The Ackerman Award is a yearly prize attributed by the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL) that rewards an exceptional thesis in the fields of Logic and Computer Science.

In particular, Amaury Pouly's thesis shows that problems which can be solved with a computer in a reasonable amount of time (more specifically problems which belong to the class P of the famous open problem “P = NP?”) can be characterized as polynomial length solutions of polynomial differential equations. This result paves the way for reformulating certain questions and concepts of theoretical computer science in terms of ordinary polynomial differential equations. It also revisits analog computational models and demonstrates that analog and digital computers actually have the same computing power, both in terms of what they can calculate (computability) and what they can solve in reasonable (polynomial) time.

Amaury did a joint PhD with the Laboratoire d'informatique de l'X (LIX), UMR Ecole Polytechnique and CNRS in France, and the University of Algarve in Portugal. His thesis supervisors were Olivier Bournez from the Ecole Polytechnique in France and Daniel Graça from IT and the University of Algarve. “We were very happy to know that Amaury's PhD thesis was awarded the "Ackermann Award". This prize was very important to us, since it acknowledges the high quality of the work done by Amaury during his PhD and recognizes the merit of the line of work we have been pursuing in the last few years”, said Daniel Graça.

Amaury Pouly, who is currently a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany, will receive the award at this year´s annual conference of the EACSL, 20-24 August, in Stockholm, Sweden.