MSR Awards

Call for Nominations

The Mining Software Repositories community has introduced a series of two awards, the MSR Ric Holt Early Career Achievement Award and the MSR Foundational Contribution Award.

MSR Ric Holt Early Career Achievement Award

This award recognizes outstanding junior researchers who have provided outstanding contributions in the area of mining software repositories. The award recognizes research outputs produced by candidates during the early stages of their career. To be eligible, a candidate’s most recent computer-related educational degree (baccalaureate, masters, or doctoral degree) must have been awarded on or after January 1, 2015. If the degree included a defense, the defense must have occurred on or after January 1, 2015. If the degree included a thesis, but did not require a defense, then the final submission of the thesis must have occurred on or after January 1, 2015. The award is named after Dr. Ric Holt (1941 – 2019) who was a professor at the University of Waterloo. For the MSR 2021 Early Career Achievement Award, the recipient was Bogdan Vasilescu for his seminal contributions in the area of socio-technical behavior of software engineers.

MSR Foundational Contribution Award

The MSR Foundational Contribution Award recognizes individuals, or groups of individuals, having produced fundamental contributions in the field of mining software repositories, which helped many others (not limited to the MSR community) to build on it to advance the state of the art. It could be a tool, a dataset, a repository, or a mixture of contributions opening new research areas. It is not a requirement that such a research contribution has been presented at the MSR conference at some point. Having received other recognitions for the same contribution does not preclude an individual from being nominated for the MSR Foundational Contribution Award. In 2021, the MSR Foundational Contribution Award went to Bram Adams, for his pioneering and evangelizing work in the field of release engineering.

Nominations Procedure

The awards are based on nominations. Nominations must be submitted through the following form:

https://forms.gle/Z7xfEedV7q1J6kzq6

Along with a nomination letter, the nominator must upload between one and three reference letters. Letters cannot be from the nominator herself, and can typically be a short reference letter (1-2 pages), although longer letters are welcome. Self-nominations are disallowed.

The nomination form will ask for the following information:

• Nominator Name
• Nominator Affiliation
• Nominator Email
• Nominee(s) Name(s) (can be multiple people for the MSR Foundational Contribution Award)
• Nominee(s) Affiliation(s)
• Nominee(s) Email(s)
• Proposed citation (max 180 characters, approx. 25 words)
• Short nomination statement (max 2.000 characters, approx. 250 words)
• (upload) detailed nomination (unlimited length) in PDF format
• (upload) up to three reference letters in PDF format

Eligibility criteria

Award Committee Chairs, Award Committee Members, the current and the 1st past Steering Committee Chairs of MSR cannot nominate, cannot be nominated, and cannot endorse (write letters). Everyone else, including Steering Committee Members, can nominate, be nominated, and endorse (write letters).

Important Dates

MSR Awards Co-Chairs

• Alberto Bacchelli, University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Miryung Kim, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Recipients

• The Ric Holt award will go to Gustavo Pinto for his seminal contributions to the study of software sustainability, along dimensions of energy-consumption and social aspects of open source.

• The Foundational Contribution award will go to Dongmei Zhang and Tao Xie for their fundamental contributions in opening new areas of software analytics research with pioneering results and techniques that have had high industrial impact.