Computer Science Professor Earns Distinguished Paper Award

A paper co-written by computer science associate professor Dr. Tien N. Nguyen earned an ACM Distinguished Paper Award at the 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.

The paper, “API Code Recommendation Using Statistical Learning from Fine-grained Changes,” was co-written by Nguyen and his former students at Iowa State University, Anh Tuan Nguyen and Hoan Anh Nguyen; and his colleagues, Danny Dig and Michael Hilton at Oregon State University.

The project, led by Nguyen, addresses the problem of auto-completion for source code to help programmers improve their productivity in integrated development environments. Their approach is the first to use statistical learning from historical, fine-grained code changes via data analytics to auto-complete partially editing source code.

The honor is Nguyen’s fourth ACM Distinguished Paper Award in the past eight years at top-tier software engineering conferences, including the International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering in 2009 and the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering in 2012 and 2014. In 2015, he also earned the Best Formal Demonstration Paper Award at the International Conference on Software Engineering.