MSR Awards

Accepted Papers

Awards Recipient

• The MSR 2023 Foundational Contribution Award will go to Audris Mockus, who is being recognised for his sustained contributions to mining software repositories, starting with his early case studies of Apache and Mozilla to his introduction of the World of Code infrastructure.

• The MSR 2023 Ric Holt Early Career Achievement Award will go to Li Li, who is being recognised for his contributions to the state-of-the-art in research and practice of software quality and evolution, especially concerning the evolution of Android apps and the Android OS.

• The MSR 2023 Doctoral Research Award will go to Eman Abdullah AlOmar, who is being recognised for her contribution to understanding developer perception of refactoring: literature reviews, mining, tool, and empirical, surveys that are being adopted by the community, industrial trials.

Call for Nominations

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

MSR Distinguished Doctoral Research Award

This award recognizes outstanding doctoral research that has the potential to have a strong, long-lasting impact in the research area of mining software repositories. This award recognizes the research work carried out in the production of a dissertation submitted as one of the requirements for a PhD degree. To be eligible, the dissertation must have been dated in the two years preceding the nomination date. Therefore, for nominations for 2023, dissertations dated December 16, 2020 to December 15, 2022 are eligible. Preference will be given to nominees who have had at least one publication in any MSR track during their doctoral research.

A 4-page dissertation summary, authored by the award winner, will be published in the MSR 2023 proceedings and referenced from the MSR Award website.

Nomination procedure

This award is based on nominations written in English (the dissertation itself need not be written in English). Self-nominations are possible for this award. Nominations must be submitted through the following form: https://forms.gle/LbGU54rX1Na1Y3V58

The nomination form will ask for the following:

• The nominator’s name, affiliation, and email
• The nominee’s name, affiliation, and email
• A proposed citation for the award (max 180 characters, approx. 25 words)
• (upload) a PDF of the PhD dissertation
• (upload) the nominee’s CV including the list of publications (each entry in the publication list must specify the role of the nominee using the relevant CRediT roles, see https://credit.niso.org/, and mark whether it’s related to the dissertation produced as part of the doctoral research)
• The name, affiliation, and email of up to three references who are available to write a support letter within 4 weeks upon request (letters will be sought if the nominee is short-listed for the 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, 2016. If the degree included a defense, the defense must have occurred on or after January 1, 2016. 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, 2016. The award is named after Dr. Ric Holt (1941 – 2019) who was a professor at the University of Waterloo.

For the MSR 2022 Early Career Achievement Award, the recipient was Gustavo Pinto for his seminal contributions to the study of software sustainability, along dimensions of energy-consumption and social aspects of open source.

Nomination procedure

This award is based on nominations written in English and submitted through the following form (self-nominations are not possible for this award): https://forms.gle/ZoAidXCCUR6V2fdP6

The nomination form will ask for the following:

• The nominator’s name, affiliation, and email
• The nominee’s name, affiliation, and email
• A proposed citation for the award (max 180 characters, approx. 25 words)
• A short nomination statement (max 2.000 characters, approx. 250 words)
• (upload) detailed nomination (unlimited length) in PDF format
• The name and email of up to three references who are available to write a support letter within 4 weeks upon request (letters will be sought if the nominee is short-listed for the award)

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 2022, the MSR Foundational Contribution Award went to Tao Xie and Dongmei Zhang, for their fundamental contributions in opening new areas of software analytics research with pioneering results and techniques that have had high industrial impact.

Nomination procedure

This award is based on nominations written in English and submitted through the following form (self-nominations are not possible for this award): https://forms.gle/4wDC7e1T77ipFGcK9

The nomination form will ask for the following:

• The nominator’s name, affiliation, and email
• The nominee(s)’s name, affiliation, and email (the MSR Foundational Contribution Award can be assigned to a set of people who, e.g., worked together on a contribution)
• A proposed citation for the award (max 180 characters, approx. 25 words)
• A short nomination statement (max 2.000 characters, approx. 250 words)
• (upload) detailed nomination (unlimited length) in PDF format
• The name and email of up to three references who are available to write a support letter within 4 weeks upon request (letters will be sought if the nominee is short-listed for the award)

Further information concerning all the awards

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

• Nominations’ deadline: December 15, 2022, 23:59 AOE
• Notification: March 16, 2023
• Award ceremony: At the MSR 2023 conference.

MSR Award Co-Chairs

• Alberto Bacchelli, University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Kelly Blincoe, University of Auckland, New Zealand