SIGSOFT is the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group on software engineering.
The SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award is presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at a SIGSOFT-sponsored conference held at least 10 years prior to the award year that is judged to have had the greatest impact since its publication.
The 2013 winners: UW CSE professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Mike Ernst, AOL principal software engineer (and UW CSE M.S. alum) Jake Cockrell, UCSD professor (and UW CSE Ph.D. alum) Bill Griswold, and UW CSE professor (and advisor of all 3 others) David Notkin, for the paper “Dynamically Discovering Likely Program Invariants to Support Program Evolution,” published in the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering, and subsequently re-published as an Award Paper in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
The paper – which was the foundation for Mike Ernst’s Ph.D. dissertation – was described in the SIGSOFT award citation as follows:
This paper initiated a revolutionary and important line of research that is still very active and relevant today: extracting models of running software and reasoning about its behavior. The approach it defined has significantly influenced both the state of the art and the state of the practice. In addition, the paper described Daikon, a tool that implements this approach, and which continues to be vital and useful today, some 15 years later.
Congratulations to Mike, Jake, Bill, and David!!
(Learn about Notkinfest, a recent event honoring David Notkin, here.)