SIGSOFT Awards 2023

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 given at conferences, for example, the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, 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, which we want to highlight in this blog post. You can learn more about the program on the SIGSOFT Award web page.

The 2023 Winners!

It is our pleasure to announce the Winners of the SIGSOFT 2023 Awards.

Outstanding Research Award:

The 2023 award goes to Gail Murphy (University of British Columbia) “for pioneering contributions to recommenders for software engineering and program comprehension that have impacted both theory and practice”.

Gail C. Murphy is a Professor of Computer Science and Vice-President Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is also a co-founder of Tasktop Technologies Inc. Her research interests are in improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by giving them tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that really matters for their work. She is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is a previous recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills award, an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Award and the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize.

Distinguished Service Award:

The 2023 award goes to John Grundy (Monash University) “for continued outstanding service to the software engineering community, including the repeated successful organization of flagship conferences, and leadership in the Australasian research and education community.”

John Grundy is Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor of Software Engineering in the Faculty of IT, Monash University. He has been an academic leader for nearly 30 years and had various leadership roles at University of Auckland, Swinburne University of Technology, Deakin University and Monash University. He teaches in the area of software engineering, his research focuses on automated software engineering and human-centric software engineering, and in addition to his research grants has carried out many industry R&D and consulting projects.

He has been General Chair of ICSE 2023, ASE 2009, 2020 and 2021 and VL/HCC 2014. He served for several years as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Associate Editor in Chief and has been a TSE Associate Editor, is an ASE journal Associate Editor, ACM Computing Surveys Senior Associate Editor, and IEEE Software Associate Editor. He was president of CORE Australia 2013 and 2014. He is Fellow of Automated Software Engineering, Fellow of Engineers Australia, Chartered Professional Engineer, Engineering Executive, Senior Member of the ACM and Senior Member of the IEEE.

Influential Educator Award:

The 2023 award goes to Tao Xie (Peking University) “for significant contributions in mentoring of graduate students and junior researchers, broadening participation of underrepresented groups in software engineering/computing, and innovation in educational tooling.”

Tao Xie is a Peking University Chair Professor, Chair of the Department of Software Science and Engineering in the School of Computer Science at Peking University, a Deputy Director of the Key Lab of High Confidence Software Technologies (PKU), Ministry of Education. He was a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA. He is a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and China Computer Federation (CCF). He won an Xplorer Prize, NSFC Overseas Distinguished Young Scholar Award and its Extension Category, NSF Faculty CAREER Award, ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Service Award, IEEE TCSE Distinguished Service Award, MSR Foundational Contribution Award, ASE 2021 Most Influential Paper Award, etc. He serves as a Deputy Director of CCF TCSE, and served as Program Chair of China National Computer Congress (CNCC 2020), Program Co-Chair of ICSE 2021, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Wiley Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (STVR), etc. His main research interests include software engineering, system software, software security, trustworthy AI.

Impact Paper Award:

The 2023 award goes to EvoSuite: Automatic Test Suite Generation for Object-Oriented Software (published at ESEC/FSE 2011) by Gordon Fraser (University of Passau) and Andrea Arcuri (Kristiania University College) “for building EvoSuite, a search-based software testing tool which has a significant community around it.”

Gordon Fraser is a Full Professor in Computer Science at the University of Passau, Germany. He received a PhD in computer science from Graz University of Technology, Austria, in 2007, worked as a post-doc at Saarland University, and was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK. The central theme of his research is improving software quality, and his recent research concerns the prevention, detection, and removal of defects in software. He has built search-based test generators for multiple different testing problems, including the EvoSuite unit test generator for Java.

Andrea Arcuri is a Professor of Software Engineering at Kristiania University College and Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway. His main research interests are in software testing, especially test case generation using evolutionary algorithms. Having worked 5 years in industry as a senior engineer, a main focus of his research is to design novel research solutions that can actually be used in practice. Prof. Arcuri is the main-author of EvoMaster and a co-author of EvoSuite, which are open-source tools that can automatically generate test cases using evolutionary algorithms. He received his PhD in search-based software testing from the University of Birmingham, UK, in 2009.

Early Career Researcher Award:

The 2023 award goes to Chunyang Chen (Monash University) “for outstanding contributions to the study of intelligent software development automation including automated mobile application development, software testing, migration and accessibility.”

Chunyang Chen is a tenured senior lecturer in the Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia. His main research interest lies in automated software engineering, especially data-driven mobile app development including design, implementation and testing. Besides, he is also interested in human-centric software development including software usability, accessibility and security. He has published many research papers in top venues such as ICSE, FSE, ASE, TSE, TOSEM and obtained three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards (ICSE’21, ICSE’20, ASE’18), and two other best paper/demo awards.

Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award:

The 2023 award goes to David Shriver (now at Carnegie Mellon University) for his PhD thesis “Increasing the Applicability of Verification Tools for Neural Networks” (University of Virginia, advised by Matt Dwyer and Sebastian Elbaum).

David Shriver is a Machine Learning Research Scientist in the AI Division of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a B.S. in Computer Engineering in 2016 and an M.S. in Computer Science in 2018 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, followed by a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2022. His research interests focus on assuring the correctness of machine learned systems, particularly methods for verification and validation of AI models.

We will recognize the winners during the ICSE 2023 conference. In addition, Gail Murphy will give an invited talk at ICSE 2023, and Gordon Fraser and Andrea Arcuri are invited to give a talk at ESEC/FSE 2023.

The Selection Process

In total, the selection committees considered 39 nominations (8 for outstanding research, 4 for distinguished service, 4 for influential educator, 7 for impact paper, 8 for early career, and 8 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 (Andrea Zisman, Dongmei Zhang, and Natalia Juristo) and Deputy Chairs (Walid Maalej and Anders Moller), as well as the members of the respective committees, and all nominators.

Compared to the previous year, we have implemented the following changes to the SIGSOFT Awards and the selection process:

• Dissertations to be considered for the SIGSOFT Outstanding Dissertation Award can now be in any language (not only English). Thus, more dissertations from the SIGSOFT community from across the globe can be considered for the award.
• To better identify and resolve conflicts of interest, nominators need to submit an intent to nominate one month before the deadline of the complete nomination package submission.
• For awards where nominees are conflicted with the Chair of the selection committee, a Deputy Chair was appointed to better manage the selection process considering the conflict of interest.
• We moved the submission system to HotCRP re-configured for processing and reviewing award nominations.

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.