This award is presented to an individual or individuals who have made outstanding contributions in the area of software engineering as an early career investigator.
To be eligible for nomination for the award, individuals’ most recent computer-related educational degree (baccalaureate, masters, or doctoral degree) must have been awarded no more than seven years prior to the date of nomination. The 7-year window may be extended for extenuating circumstances such as parental or medical leave. Extenuating circumstances must be described in the nomination statement for the committee’s deliberation (the committee reserves the right to accept or deny the consideration of the extenuating circumstances).
The award recipient receives a $1000 honorarium and a plaque engraved with their name and signed by the chair of SIGSOFT. The award is announced by the SIGSOFT chair at ICSE during ICSE’s award presentation session. Each award recipient also receives travel support up to $2500 within their home continent and up to $3000 outside their home continent, including airfare, hotel, and conference registration to attend ICSE.
To submit a nomination for the award, please use the awards nomination portal. Please note that:
An intent to nominate must be submitted in the nomination system by November 4, 2024. The intent submission is very lightweight and only requires: (1) full name and affiliation of the nominee, (2) contact information of the nominator, and (3) some metadata. If no intent is received by the deadline, the nomination will be deemed late and not considered for this round of award selection.
A single PDF containing the nomination package must be submitted through the portal to complete the submission by November 11, 2024 (one week after the registration deadline). The PDF should contain the following:
- Full name and affiliation of the nominee
- Proposed citation (up to 25 words)
- Succinct description of why the nominee is well-qualified for the award (100-250 words)
- Detailed nomination statement (no length limit, but please be reasonable)
- Up to three support letters (200-300 words will be sufficient for each support letter, although longer statements of support are of course welcome). Each support letter must include the following sentence: “To the best of my knowledge, the candidate I am endorsing has not committed any action that violates the ACM Code of Ethics and ACM’s Core Values.
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-early-career-award (at) acm (dot) org.
Winners
- 2025 Jie Zhang, King’s College London, for pioneering contributions to software engineering for AI, significantly shaping and transforming the field of AI system testing.
- 2024 Kevin Moran, University of Central Florida, for outstanding contributions to improving the quality of mobile applications, through software testing, deep learning, and user interface development.
- 2023 Chunyang Chen, Monash University, for outstanding contributions to the study of intelligent software development automation including automated mobile application development, software testing, migration and accessibility
- 2022 Xin Xia, Huawei, for contributions to AI and SE, mining software repositories, and empirical software engineering
- 2021 Lingming Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for outstanding contributions to mutation testing, regression testing, fault localization, and program repair
- 2020 Claire Le Goues
- 2019 Jeff Huang
- 2018 Gabriele Bavota
- 2017 Christian Bird
Committee
2025
- Aldeida Aleti, Monash University, Australia
- Dan Hao, Peking University, China
- Justyna Petke, University College London, UK
- Foutse Khomh, University of Montreal, Canada
- Ayse Tosun, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
- Lei Mai, The University of Tokyo, Japan
- Valerio Terragni, University of Auckland, New Zealand
- Marcio Eduardo Delamaro, Universidade de São Paulo Campus de São Carlos, Brazil
- Yuriy Brun, Universeity of Massachusetts - Amherst, USA
- Marsha Chechik, University of Toronto, Canada (SIGSOFT chair, non-voting)
- Claire Le Goues, Carnegie Mellon University, USA (SIGSOFT award chair, non-voting)
2024
- Myra B. Cohen, Iowa State University, United States (chair)
- Gordon Fraser, University of Passau, Germany (deputy chair)
- Aldeida Aleti, Monash University, Australia
- Kelly Blincoe, University of Auckland, New Zealand
- Gregory Gay, Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden
- Cindy Rubio-Gonzalez, UC Davis, United States
- Rachel Tzoref-Brill, IBM, Israel
- Shin Yoo, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea
- Lingming Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
- Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research, United States (SIGSOFT chair, non-voting)
- David Lo, Singapore Management University, Singapore (SIGSOFT award chair, non-voting)
2023
- Natalia Juristo, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain (chair)
- Grace A. Lewis, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
- Shahar Maoz, Tel Aviv University, Israel
- Ignacio Panach, Universitat de Valencia, Spain
- Birgit Penzenstadler, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
- Federica Sarro, University College London, United Kingdom
- Francisco Servant, Universidad de Malaga, Spain
- Ayse Tosun, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
- Tao Xie, Peking University, China
- Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research, United States (SIGSOFT chair, non-voting)
- David Lo, Singapore Management University, Singapore (SIGSOFT award chair, non-voting)
2022
- Christian Bird, Microsoft Research, United States (chair)
- Paolo Tonella, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland
- Jeff Huang, Texas A&M University, United States
- Lingming Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
- Shing-Chi Cheung, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
- Dan Hao, Peking University, China
- Natalia Juristo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
- Myra B. Cohen, Iowa State University, United States
- Lin Tan, Purdue University, United States (non-voting)
- Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research, United States (SIGSOFT chair, non-voting)
- David Lo, Singapore Management University, Singapore (SIGSOFT award chair, non-voting)
2021
- Antonio Carzaniga (chair)
- Myra Cohen
- James Noble
- Paolo Tonella