News: Prof. Gernot Heiser Receipient of the 2025 TCRTS Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award!
It is our pleasure to announce that Professor Gernot Heiser is the 2025 awardee of the TCRTS Outstanding Achievement and Leadership Award.
Professor Gernot Heiser is Scientia Professor and John Lions Chair of Operating Systems at UNSW Sydney Australia, an ACM and IEEE fellow, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW. He has received an impressive number of awards, recognizing his long list of achievements on operating systems with time-oriented properties. Gernot is a true ambassador of real-time systems and of the impact of operating systems and hypervisors on the execution time of programs, outreaching to numerous scientific communities, well covered by the CPS-IoT week.
One word may characterize well his work - the diversity. Geographical diversity - after a BSc from Freiburg, a MSc from Brock University in Canada and a PhD from ETH Zurich, he has been a member of academic staff at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia and then later in 2002, NICTA, Australia's national centre of excellence in ICT research, as one of its founding staff. The diversity of his co-authors, we have counted at least twenty different nationalities and one may find important female figures like June Andronick or Mona Vij among them. Clearly, the diversity of academic and industry achievements needs also to be underlined. The industrial impact of his academic results has been one important priority, way before building start ups was a success criteria. Last but clearly not least, it comes the wideness of his contributions from microkernel technology and the application of formal methods to systems to the use of multi-dimensional device simulation for the characterization and optimisation of silicon solar cells. Probably all results would not have been there, if Professor Heiser would not have accepted to create and lead research groups. Indeed, such a role takes time, but they are the key when the creation and the world-first formal verification of the seL4 microkernel is at the end. The commercial uptake of L4 microkernel technology led to the creation of Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), accelerating the deployment of the technology in billions of mobile devices (acquired by General Dynamics in 2012). Its legacy is backed by the non-profit seL4 Foundation and its membership, accelerating seL4's development and real-world deployment.
We wish Gernot all the best for his adventure within the startup Neutrality, based in Geneva and we congratulate him for this important award of the real-time community.