Congratulations to Professor Miryung Kim of UCLA and her former PhD student, Baishakhi Ray, who is currently an Associate Professor at Columbia University. They were honored with the Most Influential Paper Award at this year’s International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME).
The award recognizes their paper titled “An Empirical Study of API Stability and Adoption in the Android Ecosystem,” authored by Tyler McDonnell, Baishakhi Ray, and Miryung Kim. Their groundbreaking empirical study on API stability and adoption within software ecosystems has set a new standard for research in this domain. By utilizing the GitHub version history data from Android applications, Professor Kim and her students were able to quantify the co-evolution behavior of Android APIs and the applications that depend on them. Their research revealed that slow API adoption can lead to risks for client applications, such as security vulnerabilities or performance issues.
Their work inspired a wave of subsequent research on API stability and adoption, establishing it as a vital area of study within software engineering. Their work had a profound impact on automating API migration, change impact analysis of APIs, static analysis for API compatibility and vulnerability, and continuous testing on API dependency management.
The International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution is an annual gathering that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share, discuss, and debate the latest ideas, experiences, and challenges in the realm of software maintenance and evolution.
We once again extend our warm congratulations to Professor Miryung Kim for her research contributions and for the well-deserved recognition at ICSME.