ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award

Jake Cockrell, Bill Griswold, David Notkin, and I received the 2013 SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award for our paper Dynamically Discovering Likely Program Invariants to Support Program Evolution, which appeared in ICSE '99.

The award citation reads:

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.

The award includes a $1000 honorarium, which we donated to the David Notkin Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Computer Science & Engineering.

This paper was the foundation of my PhD dissertation.

Later, a journal version of the paper was published in TSE in 2001.  If you read the journal version, feel free to skip sections 5-8, which are not as interesting as the other parts of the journal paper.

This work received other awards including being selected for expedited journal publication (this was the precursor to the ACM Distinguished Paper Award, which was introduced in 2002), honorable mention in the ACM doctoral dissertation competition (the first honorable mention that had been awarded in 7 years), and best software engineering dissertation of the prior three years (awarded at ICSM 2001).

However, I feel that a retrospective award such as the SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award is much more meaningful than any of those awards that were presented at the time of publication.  It's very difficult to determine the importance of a piece of research when it first appears.  The perspective of time reveals whether the paper was foundational or merely clever.

I tend to dislike best-paper awards (and proxy awards such as nomination or expedited journal publication), because they are so random and therefore not very meaningful.  (Before I offend my colleagues who are reading this, let me clarify that the randomness or meaninglessness applies to the times I have been so honored, at ICSE 1999, ICSE 2000, VMCAI 2003, ESEC/FSE 2003, ICSE 2004, ASE 2005, ISSTA 2006, ASE 2006, ICSE 2007, ESEC/FSE 2007, ASE 2007, ISSTA 2008, ISSTA 2009, ECOOP 2011, and ESEC/FSE 2011.  But the honors accorded to your papers, dear reader, were surely well-deserved recognition of research that is clearly better than any other research presented at that conference.)  That's why I don't generally list these on my webpages, for example.

Despite my opinion of how meaningful a best-paper award often is, I do support conferring them.  The reason is that these are useful to graduate students and to junior faculty members:  the awards buttress those young scientists' c.v.s and therefore their careers.