The SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award is presented annually to the author of an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of Software Engineering. The author of the winning dissertation will be invited to publish a dissertation summary in the SIGSOFT newsletter, Software Engineering Notes (SEN). The award includes a $1000 honorarium and a plaque for the author, which is presented at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), and funding support for the recipient to travel to ICSE to receive the award (including a registration to ICSE). A public citation for the award dissertation will be placed on the SIGSOFT web site. The award recipient also receives support for travel to ICSE up to $2500 within their home continent and up to $3000 outside their home continent, including airfare, hotel, and conference registration for ICSE.
The award is for an outstanding dissertation (in software engineering) dated within the year preceding the nomination due date. For nominations for the January 15, 2023 deadline, dissertations dated December 15, 2021 to December 31, 2022 are eligible.
To submit a nomination for the award, please use the awards nomination portal. Please note that:
The selection committee shall have the option to decline to make an award in a given year, if no suitable nominations are presented. If you have questions about this award, please contact sigsoft-dissertation-award (at) acm (dot) org.
| 2023 | David Shriver, Increasing the Applicability of Verification Tools for Neural Networks, University of Virginia, advisors: Matt Dwyer and Sebastian Elbaum |
| 2022 | Wing Lam, Detecting, Characterizing, and Taming Flaky Tests, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advisors: Darko Marinov and Tao Xie |
| 2021 | August Shi, Improving Regression Testing Efficiency and Reliability via Test-Suite Transformations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advisor: Darko Marinov |
| 2020 | Rachel Tzoref-Brill, Comprehension and Evolution of Combinatorial Models and Test Plans, Tel Aviv University |
| 2019 | Sergey Mechtaev, Semantic Program Repair, National University of Singapore; Honorable Mention: Christoffer Quist Adamsen, Automated Testing Techniques for Event-Driven and Dynamically Typed Software Applications, Aarhus University |
| 2018 | Fan Long, Automatic Patch Generation via Learning from Successful Human Patches, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| 2017 | Srdan Krstic, Trace Checking of Quantitative Properties, Politecnico di Milano |
| 2016 | Milos Gligoric, Regression Test Selection: Theory and Practice, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Darko Marinov, advisor |
| 2015 | Muath Alkhalaf, Automatic Detection and Repair of Input Validation and Sanitization Bugs, University of California, Santa Barbara, Tevfik Bultan, advisor |
| 2014 | Nicolas Mangano, Calico: An early-phase software design tool, University of California, Irvine, André van der Hoek, advisor |
| 2013 | Jeff Huang, Effective Methods for Debugging Concurrent Software, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Charles Zhang, advisor |
| 2012 | Mark Gabel, Inferring Programmer Intent and Related Errors from Software, University of California, Davis, Zhendong Su, advisor |