News Release

UC San Diego Researcher Receives Prestigious Computer Science Award

Computer scientist William G. Griswold is one of the recipients of the SIGSOFT 2013 Impact Paper Award.

New York, July 29, 2013 – William G. Griswold, a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego, along with a team of colleagues, has been awarded the 2013 Impact Paper Award from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering.

Griswold shares the award with colleagues Michael D. Ernst and David Notkin, of the University of Washington, and Jake Cockrell of AOL, for the paper they co-authored, “Dynamically Discovering Likely Program Invariants to Support Program Evolution,” published in the proceedings of ICSE ‘99— the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering (Los Angeles, Calif., May 16 to 22, 1999). 

This paper initiated a revolutionary and important line of research that is still very active and relevant today: extracting models of software and reasoning about its behavior. The approach it defined − analyzing runtime traces to detect consistent properties at key points in the program text − 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.

Researchers will receive the award Aug. 23, 2013 at the ninth joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2013) in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Griswold joined UC San Diego in 1991.  His research focuses on software engineering and ubiquitous computing.  He is best known for his foundational work in refactoring, as well as work on aspect-oriented programming (for example, AspectJ) and the ActiveCampus ubiquitous computing system.  He has been the chair of ACM SIGSOFT, co-program chair of the 2005 International Conference on Software Engineering and program chair of the 2002 ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.

The ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award   is presented annually to the authors of a paper presented at a SIGSOFT sponsored or co-sponsored conference held at least 10 years prior to the award year. In including all of SIGSOFT's conferences in the competition, this award recognizes the breadth and vitality of the software engineering community. The papers are judged by their influence since their publication. The award includes a $1,000 honorarium to be split amongst the authors as they choose, an award plaque for each author and an invitation for the authors to present a keynote talk at the current year’s annual SIGSOFT Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) symposium.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

The ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT), provides a forum for computing professionals from industry, government and academia to examine principles, practices and new research results in software engineering. The ACM SIGSOFT seeks to improve our ability to engineer software by stimulating interaction among practitioners, researchers and educators; by fostering the professional development of software engineers; and by representing software engineers to professional, legal and political entities.

Media Contacts

Ioana Patringenaru
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-822-0899
ipatrin@ucsd.edu