With the announcement of the 2014 winners of the Microsoft Research Awards for the Software Engineering Innovations Foundation (SEIF Awards), I can’t help but reflect on the depth and breadth of research supported by Microsoft Research. Over the past few years, SEIF Awards have not only sponsored research into core software engineering challenges but has also funded investigations into software engineering’s applications in mobile and cloud computing and natural user interface (NUI). This year was no exception to the this emphasis on depth and breadth: for 2014, SEIF invited proposals addressing core software engineering challenges as well as those that delving into the application of software engineering to the Internet of Things and large-scale cloud infrastructure. These latter two areas were explored as a partnership between Lab of Things and Global Foundation Services, respectively.
Before I reveal the 2014 winners, let me say a bit about the diversity and quality of the proposals. We received 129 proposals, coming from nearly 30 countries and every continent (okay, except Antarctica). The SEIF Award has truly become an internationally recognized program! Some 70 reviewers from across Microsoft conducted an internal review of the proposals, all of which were of exceedingly high quality. It was extremely difficult to choose the 12 winning projects, each of which will receive funding of US$40,000.
Here, then, are the 2014 SEIF award-winning projects:
- Linking Constructive and Analytical Software Verification
Michael Butler, University of Southampton - Script Synthesis through Examples
Ruzica Piskac, Yale University - Dependency Aware Sharing of the Internet of Things for Integrating Apps in Smart Homes
Jack Stankovic, University of Virginia - Teaching Software Engineering to the Masses with TouchDevelop
Alessandro Orso, Georgia Institute of Technology - Improving Datacenter Efficiency and Total Cost of Ownership with Differentiated Software Reliability Analysis and Techniques
Onur Mutlu, Carnegie Mellon University - Resource Efficient Cloud Computing
Christoforos Kozyrakis, Stanford University - Augmenting Testing with Performance-Aware Behavioral Models
Yuriy Brun, University of Massachusetts Amherst - Kinect-based Training to Improve Balance, Mobility, and Quality of Life in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease
Jeffrey Haddad, Purdue University - A Spreadsheet Model for End-User Programming with Probabilistic Data
Scott Hudson, Carnegie Mellon University - Systematic Analysis of User Reviews and Usage Data for Windows Mobile Apps
Walid Maalej, University of Hamburg - CoolProvision: Provisioning of Cooling Systems for Datacenters
Thu Nguyen, Rutgers University - Reliable and Resilient Microgrids for Data Centers
Reinaldo Tonkoski and Wei Sun,
South Dakota State University
Congratulations to the 2014 SEIF Award winners! See the winners on the SEIF Awards page.
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