2022 ICSE MIP Award for Zhendong Su
Professor Zhendong Su is awarded the prestigious ICSE Most Influential Paper Award for the paper "On the Naturalness of Software". The paper emerged from a collaboration with former students and colleagues at UC Davis.
For a paper written in 2012, Professor Zhendong Su from the Institute for Programming Languages and Systems at ETH Zurich, is awarded the 2022 ICSE Most Influential Paper Award. The paper, titled "On the Naturalness of Software", was written in collaboration with Abram Hindle, Earl Barr, Mark Gabel and Prem Devanbu.
In the paper, the authors begin with the conjecture that most software is natural, in the sense that it is created by humans at work, with all the attendant constraints and limitations – and thus, like natural language, it is also likely to be repetitive and predictable. The authors then proceed to ask whether (1) code can be usefully modeled by statistical language models, and (2) such models can be leveraged to support software engineers. Using the widely adopted n-gram model, Zhendong and his colleagues provide empirical evidence supportive of a positive answer to both these questions. They show that code is also very repetitive, and in fact even more so than natural languages. As an example use of the model, they have developed a simple code completion engine for Java that, despite its simplicity, already improves Eclipse's built-in completion capability. The authors conclude this pioneering and influential paper by laying out a vision for future research in this area.
About Zhendong Su: Zhendong Su is a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich since August 2018. He had been a Full Professor of Computer Science and a Chancellor's Fellow at UC Davis until June 2019. He is passionate about fundamental and practical innovations for building software. His research spans programming languages and compilers, software engineering, computer security, deep learning and education technologies. His work has received an ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award, a Google Scholar Classic Paper (2017) Award, more than a dozen best/distinguished paper and artifact awards at top Computer Science venues, an ACM CACM Research Highlight, an NSF CAREER Award, a UC Davis Outstanding Engineering Faculty Award and multiple industrial faculty awards (Cisco, Google x 3, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla). He is also an elected member of the Academia Europaea.
ICSE Most Influential Paper Award
The award is presented at each ICSE, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering to the author(s) of the paper from the ICSE conference of 10 years ago that is judged to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of software engineering during the 10 years since its original publication. The award is jointly sponsored by ACM SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE.