SIGSOFT Awards 2022
By David Lo (SIGSOFT Awards Chair) and Thomas Zimmermann (SIGSOFT Chair)
SIGSOFT has an award program to recognize the outstanding contributions of the members of the software engineering community. Many of the awards are designated at conferences, for example, the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award as well as several Most Influential Paper and Test of Time Awards. In addition, SIGSOFT has annual awards for contributions that go beyond a single conference. You can learn more about the program on the SIGSOFT Award web-page.
The 2022 Winners!
It is our pleasure to announce the Winners of the SIGSOFT 2022 Awards.
- Outstanding Research Award: Lionel Briand (University of Ottawa and University of Luxembourg) “for contributions in software testing, software quality assurance, and context-driven software engineering research, notably in exemplary collaborations with industry”. For more information, please see “Prof. Lionel Briand Wins ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award”.
- Distinguished Service Award: Jo Atlee (University of Waterloo) “for sustained, outstanding service to the software engineering community and enabling a research environment in software engineering world-wide that is equitable, diverse and inclusive.” For more information, please see “Jo Atlee receives 2022 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award”.
- Influential Educator Award: Miryung Kim (University of California, Los Angeles) “for outstanding achievements in undergraduate and graduate mentoring with emphasis on research excellence in software engineering, diversity and inclusion.” For more information, please see “Professor Miryung Kim wins the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award”.
- Impact Paper Award: Using task context to improve programmer productivity by Mik Kersten and Gail Murphy (published at FSE 2006) “for pioneering the concept of a task context, which has improved software practice and inspired new research.”
- Early Career Researcher Award. Xin Xia (Huawei) “for contributions to AI and SE, mining software repositories, and empirical software engineering.”
- Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. Wing Lam (now George Mason University) for the PhD thesis “Detecting, Characterizing, and Taming Flaky Tests” (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Darko Marinov and Tao Xie). For more information, please see “Wing Lam brings home a flaky test achievement”.
We will recognize the winners during the hybrid ICSE 2022 conference. In addition, Lionel Briand will give an invited talk at ICSE 2022 and Mik Kersten and Gail Murphy are invited to give a talk at ESEC/FSE 2022.
The Selection Process
In total, the selection committees considered 34 nominations (5 for outstanding research, 2 for distinguished service, 3 for influential educator, 6 for impact paper, 6 for early career, and 12 for outstanding dissertation). The decisions were made through a combination of online discussions and virtual meetings. A huge thanks to the SIGSOFT Award Committee Chairs Marsha Chechik, Cristian Cadar, and Christian Bird, as well as the members of the respective committees, and all nominators.
Compared to previous years, we’ve implemented the following changes to the SIGSOFT Awards and the selection process:
- The 7-year window for the Early Career Researcher Award may now be extended for extenuating circumstances such as parental or medical leave. The circumstances must be described in the nomination statement for the committee’s deliberation.
- Award committees. We’ve reduced the number of award committees to three: (1) a committee for outstanding dissertation and early career awards, (2) a committee for outstanding research, influential educator, and distinguished service awards, and (3) a committee for the impact paper award. We posted the committee members four weeks prior to the award deadline. Committee members were approved by the SIGSOFT Chair and the SIGSOFT Awards Chairs and checked against the ACM Violations database.
- Conflict of interest rules. Committee members were not allowed to be nominated, nominate, or endorse for any of the awards that are handled by their committee. This also included the Impact Paper Award.
If you have any suggestions on the award process, please reach out to any of the members of the SIGSOFT executive committee. We are planning to further improve the award selection process and introduce new awards.
Disclaimer: The posts in the SIGSOFT Blog are written by individual contributors and any views or opinions represented in their posts are personal, belong solely to the blog authors and do not necessarily represent those of ACM SIGSOFT or ACM.
