Distributed Computing Column 68

As with prior December issues, this issue is devoted to a review of notable events related to distributed computing that occurred during the year. First, congratulations to Elizabeth Borowksy and Eli Gafni, winners of the 2017 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for their paper “Generalized FLP Impossibility Result for t-Resilient Computations”! Their paper appeared in the 1993 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC). The prize is jointly sponsored by ACM and EATCS, and is given alternately at PODC1 and DISC2; this year it was given at DISC. To quote from the award committee’s citation,