SIGSOFT Awards SEN 2025
SIGSOFT has an awards program to recognize outstanding contributions by members of the software engineering community. Conferences designate many of these awards, like the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, as well as certain Most Influential Paper and Test of Time Awards. Beyond these, 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 Awards web page.
The 2025 Winners!
It is our pleasure to announce the Winners of the SIGSOFT 2025 Awards.
Outstanding Research Award
Martin Rinard (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) “for fundamental contributions in pioneering the new fields of program repair and approximate computing.”
Martin Rinard is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research focuses on software systems and related topics, including computer security, program analysis and compilation, machine learning and programming, approximate computing, and software robustness and reliability. Dr. Rinard’s research has been recognized with many honors and awards, and his students and postdocs have gone on to top positions in academia and industry.
Distinguished Service Award
Mauro Pezzé, Università della Svizzera Italiana, “for service to the software engineering community for three decades, and specifically for his recent contributions to TOSEM as Editor-in-Chief.”
Mauro Pezzè is a professor of software engineering at USI — Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, and Constructor Institute, Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Mauro Pezzè coordinates the STAR — Software Testing and Analysis research Lab, a joint research team at USI and Constructor Institute. In addition to his term as editor in chief of ACM TOSEM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, he has also served in the editorial board of IEEE TSE Transactions on Software Engineering and STVR, the International Journal of Software Testing, Analysis and Verification. He served as program chair of ICSE, the International Conference on Software Engineering, in 2012, and program and general chair of ISSTA, the ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, in 2006 and 2013, respectively. He is the co-author of an influential book ‘Software Testing and Analysis, Process, Principle and Techniques, and is known for his work on software testing, program analysis, self-healing and self-adaptive software systems.
Influential Educator Award
Andreas Zeller (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and Saarland University) “for significant contributions and important innovations in automated software engineering education.”
Andreas Zeller is faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University. His research on automated debugging, mining software archives, specification mining, and security testing has been highly influential. Andreas is one of the few researchers to have received two ERC Advanced Grants, most recently for his S3 project. He is an ACM Fellow and also holds an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.
Impact Paper Award
“Expectations, outcomes, and challenges of modern code review”, published at ICSE 2013, by Alberto Bacchelli (University of Zurich, UZH) and Christian Bird (Microsoft Research), “for providing foundational understanding of modern code review, advancing the state of practice, and charting the course of research in code review through empirical investigations.”
Alberto Bacchelli is an associate professor ofEmpirical Software Engineering at University of Zurich, Switzerland, where he leads the Zurich Empirical Software Engineering Team (ZEST).
His broader research vision is to innovate software engineering, through fundamental empirical research and software tools. His goal is to increase our scientific knowledge of today’s software development and to design, based on strong empirical evidence and theory, the right tools, languages, and development environments for high-quality software engineering.
Christian Bird is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research working on Empirical Software Engineering as part of the Research in Software Engineering RiSE group. He received my bachelor’s degree in CS from Brigham Young University and my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Davis, studying empirical software engineering in the DECAL group under my advisor Prem Devanbu. He is working on ways to use data to guide decisions of stakeholders in large software projects.
Early Career Researcher Award
Jie Zhang (King’s College, London), “For pioneering contributions to software engineering for AI, significantly shaping and transforming the field of AI system testing.”
Jie M. Zhang is a Lecturer (assistant professor) at King’s College London, UK. She is passionate about LLM4Code, software testing, software engineering for AI, and trustworthy AI; Her research focuses on bridging software engineering (SE) and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the trustworthiness of both domains. She is a steering committee member of international conferences IEEE ICST and ACM AIware. She has been selected as the top-fifteen 2023 Global Chinese Female Young Scholars in interdisciplinary AI. Her research has won the 2022 Transactions on Software Engineering Best Paper award and the ICLR 2022 Spotlight Paper award. Jie Zhang obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Peking University, China. Before joining King’s, she was a research fellow at UCL working with Professor Mark Harman and Professor Federica Sarro.
Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (Joint)
Jialun Cao (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), “Towards Automatic Testing and Fault Localization in Natural Language Processing Systems” (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, advised by Shing-Chi Cheung).
Jialun Cao received her PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), under the supervision of Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung in the CASTLE lab. She is now a Research Assistant Professor in HKUST. Her research interests lie in the intersection of Software Engineering (SE) and Large Language Models (LLMs), with an emphasis on LLM4SE, and LLM Evaluation. She has published more than 20 papers at the top conferences and journals, including ICSE, FSE, ASE, TOSEM, CAV, Usenix Security, AAAI, etc. She serves as a program committee member in top conferences such as ICSE, FSE, and ASE, SANER, Internetware, APSEC, etc; and is a reviewer for top journals including TOSEM, TSE, EmSE, etc.
Elizabeth Dinella (now at Bryn Mawr College), “Neural Inference of Program Specifications” (University of Pennsylvania, advised by Mayur Naik).
Elizabeth Dinella is an Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College. Her research interests are in Software Engineering and Machine Learning, focusing on the integration of symbolic program analysis and neural techniques to improve software correctness. Ultimately, her research objective is to create program analysis techniques that are effective and reliable through Cooperative Program Reasoning and Neural Modeling. Elizabeth’s foundational work on AI for software engineering has been highly cited, patented, and deployed in industrial systems. Elizabeth’s teaching approach emphasizes bridging theory and practice and breaking down complex concepts in an accessible way; she strives to connect high-level theory with hands-on experiences.
Frank Anger Memorial Award
Liu Wang (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT)), to travel to a SIGBED flagship conference.
Liu Wang is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), working under the mentorship of Prof. Yi Wang and co-supervised by Prof. Haoyu Wang. Her research interests lie at the intersection of privacy, security, and software engineering. Her work mainly focuses on mobile app analysis, particularly, developing approaches to address the increasing security and privacy concerns within mobile app ecosystems, as well as mining and modeling app data to promote best operational practices across app markets. She is currently working on investigating novel applications of large language models (LLMs) in software engineering workflows and privacy-preserving systems.
We recognized the winners during the ICSE 2025 conference awards plenary, during which Martin Rinard gave an invited talk. Additionally, Christian Bird and Alberto Bachelli will give an invited talk at FSE 2025.
The Selection Process
In total, the selection committees considered 56 nominations across all awards categories. The decisions were made through a combination of online discussions and virtual meetings. A huge thanks to the SIGSOFT Award Committee Chairs (Lionel Briand, Aldeida Aleti, and Abhik Roychoudhury), as well as the members of the respective committees, and all nominators.
We are planning further improvements to the award selection process (including adjustments to the nomination/award timeline), as well as new awards, including a SIGSOFT Hall of Fame. If you have any suggestions on the award process, please reach out to any of the members of the SIGSOFT executive committee.
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.
