Brown University Programming Languages Team Receives ECOOP’s Distinguished Paper And Distinguished Artifact Awards
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on July 16, 2025
A crucial feature of formal methods tools is their visualizer, which lets users explore generated models through graphical representations. But even when the diagrams are clean and well-organized, they can still be confusing if the layout doesn’t reflect the structure that users expect.
A recent response (Cope and Drag, also known as CnD) from Brown University Programming Languages Team (Brown PLT) is a novel lightweight diagramming language built to address those issues. It’s just earned recognition at the 2025 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), receiving both a Distinguished Paper and a Distinguished Artifact Award. It’s the work of Brown CS doctoral student Siddhartha Prasad, Ben Greenman of the University of Utah (formerly a Brown CS postdoctoral researcher), and Brown CS faculty members Tim Nelson and Shriram Krishnamurthi.
CnD’s design is driven by cognitive science principles that influence spatial reasoning, visualization, and diagramming. It combines this with a bottom-up analysis that distills patterns from dozens of actual custom visualizations, and finds the two come together nicely. The resulting language is small, uses minimal notation, and can be used incrementally.
You can learn more about CnD in Brown PLT’s recent blog post here, or read the full paper here.
Most recently, Brown PLT was similarly recognized less than a year ago, earning two of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA)’s seven Distinguished Paper Awards.
The photo of Ben Greenman above is by Alexandra Garcia.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
