Carnegie Mellon University

Portrait of Claire Le Goues

May 30, 2019

Le Goues Among Those Tapped for “Most Influential” Paper at ICSE 2019

By Josh Quicksall

Claire Le Goues, faculty member in the School of Computer Science’s Institute for Software Research, was among a team of researchers to receive the prestigious Most Influential Paper Award at the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Montreal this week.

Awarded during the annual conference - the world’s premier research forum on software engineering, the honor is given only to those paper which are judged to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of software engineering during the 10 years since its original publication.

The paper, “Automatically finding patches using genetic programming” was co-authored by Le Goues during her time as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, studying with the paper’s lead author, Dr. Westley Weimer (Univ. of Michigan). Additional co-authors on the paper include ThanhVu Nguyen (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Stephanie Forrest (Arizona State University).

In the paper, Weimer and his team outline an approach, eventually named GenProg, to a fully automated method for locating and repairing bugs in software. A highly flexible solution, GenProg worked to discover bugs in legacy software using an extended form of genetic programming to evolve program variants until one is found that both retains required functionality and also avoids the defect in question.

The paper has gone on to form the backbone of a whole new world of program analysis and transformation. Highly cited in academic studies, the work has served as a jumping-off-point for tools in use by large software companies such as Facebook.

In addition to this most recent award, Le Goues is a recipient of a Facebook Testing and Verification Research Award, a  2018 ACM ICSE Distinguished Paper Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and more.

To learn more about Dr. Le Goues’ work, visit her website.