The paper 'MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in Ethereum smart contracts', led by Neville Grech, was selected as one of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGPLAN Research Highlights for 2019. Dr Grech's paper also earned a 'Distinguished Paper award' at the OOPSLA 2018 Conference. An article based on the paper will appear in the Communications of the ACM (CACM) magazine, as a Research Highlight.

Since 2008, 54 papers from all Programming Language venues have been selected as SIGPLAN Research Highlights. Fifteen of them have been further selected and published as CACM Research Highlights. ACM is the world's largest computing society. It recognizes excellence through its eminent awards for technical and professional achievements and contributions in computer science and information technology.

Referring to Dr Grech's work, the ACM committee stated: 'Blockchain technology is currently attracting significant interest, and security requirements are at its core. This paper shows beautifully how state-of-the-art programming-language techniques can be brought to bear to improve the security of the blockchain infrastructure we may all depend on in the future.'

Dr Neville Grech is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Athens and an affiliate lecturer at the University of Malta. The work was co-authored with collaborators from the University of Sydney and overseen by Prof. Yannis Smaragdakis from the University of Athens.