MSR Awards

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 2024, dissertations dated December 16, 2021 to December 15, 2023 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 ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (SEN) and referenced from the MSR Award website.

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

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/v5WLGAEURdTWuNJ49

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, 2017. If the degree included a defense, the defense must have occurred on or after January 1, 2017. 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, 2017. The award is named after Dr. Ric Holt (1941 – 2019) who was a professor at the University of Waterloo.

The eligibility period may be extended under the following scenarios:

• Extended sickness leave or part-time employment as a result of ongoing childcare or other caregiving responsibilities. Applicants can, with the prior approval of the Award Chairs, have their eligibility extended on a calculated pro rata for the year count.
• Eligibility may also be extended to take into account any career interruptions experienced due to being the primary caregiver for young children born since their PhD was awarded. If the applicant is the primary caregiver of a dependent child, the applicant is able to extend the period of eligibility by two years per child. The extension of two years per dependent child is inclusive of any periods of parental leave. There is no maximum identified.

For the MSR 2023 Early Career Achievement Award, the recipient was Li Li  for his seminal 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.

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/uFUyodVsu7ZpuD9TA 

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 2023, the MSR Foundational Contribution Award went to Audris Mockus, for his fundamental contributions to mining software repositories, starting with his early case studies of Apache and Mozilla to his introduction of the World of Code infrastructure.

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/etQyupwhwhMp47GbA 

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).

Awards Criteria

• Research contribution: For all awards, we will consider the extent to which the candidate’s work advances the existing knowledge, theories, or practices. We’ll look for research that introduces novel concepts, approaches, or solutions to existing problems. For the Foundational Contribution Award, it will be expected that the contributions enable others in the MSR community and beyond to advance the state of the art.
• Impact: For all awards, we will consider the extent to which the contributions have impacted or have the potential to impact the field of mining software repositories. 
• Merit relative to opportunity: The overall quality and impact of contributions and achievements will be given more weight than the quantity or rate of particular achievements, recognizing that these factors may be affected by personal circumstances and working arrangements. 

Important Dates

• Nominations deadline: December 15, 2023, 23:59 AOE
• Notification: March 15, 2024
• Award ceremony: At the MSR 2024 conference

MSR Award Co-Chairs

• Gustavo Pinto, University of Pará, Brazil
• Kelly Blincoe, University of Auckland, New Zealand