Dr. William C. Carter (1917-1996) was a key figure in the formation and development of the field of dependable computing and fault tolerance. He graduated in mathematics at the Balliol College in Oxford, England, and received his doctorate in mathematics from  Harvard University in 1947. His career spanned over four decades, from programming, debugging, and recovery in ENlAC, through reliability, availability and serviceability during the evolution and definition of IBM mainframes. He designed and developed computers and programming systems for Raytheon, Datamatic, Honeywell and IBM, he was a fellow of IEEE, and he with his brother established a Carter Professorship in Mathematics at the Colby College, Waterville, Maine.

In particular, he took great interest in the future of the field and was instrumental in promoting the work of young contributors. It was characteristic of Bill to take the initiative in reaching out to students and younger colleagues. Despite the demands of his own career, he knew the value of taking the time to encourage, mentor, and inspire newcomers to the field.

The William C. Carter Award has been presented annually since 1997, and was established by the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing (TC-FTC) together with the IFIP Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance (WG lOA). The award is intended to honor and carry on Dr. Carter’s legacy by recognizing an outstanding paper based
on a graduate dissertation.

To qualify, a paper based on a student’s dissertation must have been submitted as a regular conference paper to DSN, with the student as the first author. Both current graduate students and former graduate students, no more than two years past the completion of their dissertation, are eligible. All Carter Award submissions accepted as regular DCCS and PDS
papers were evaluated by the DSN Steering Committee.

The winner of the 2013 William C. Carter Award is

Suman Saha
Laboratory of Computer Sciences, Paris 6, France
for the paper entitled
Hector: Detecting Resource-Release Omission Faults
in Error-Handling Code for Systems Software
Suman Saha, Jean-Pierre Lozi, Gael Thomas, Julia Lawall, Gilles Muller