Professor Miryung Kim, Vice Chair of Graduate Studies in the UCLA Computer Science Department, has received the 2026 IEEE TCSE New Directions Award. This research impact award is presented annually to an individual or team whose pioneering software engineering research has moved the field in a new direction and influenced other researchers to build on their contribution.
The award committee cited Professor Kim’s leadership in data-driven software analytics and her work in establishing the significance of code clones in industrial software evolution. Her research challenged the long-held belief that “copy-and-paste” programming was purely detrimental. Instead, she demonstrated how recurring, duplicated code patterns could be analyzed to understand how software evolves, automate bug fixes, and streamline API updates.
For over two decades, Professor Kim and her team have provided crucial insights into how large-scale software systems evolve, stimulating new research directions in clone detection, AI-driven program repair, and the identification of similar bugs and security vulnerabilities. Her work in formalizing code regularity helped establish the principle that large-scale code repositories can be leveraged for code recommendation, refactoring, and automated repair—insights that inform the development of modern AI-driven developer tools.
Professor Kim is an ACM Distinguished Member and received the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award for outstanding achievements in mentoring with emphasis on research excellence in software engineering. Eight of her former students and postdocs are faculty members at institutions such as Columbia, Purdue, and Virginia Tech. She will formally accept the IEEE TCSE New Directions Award at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2026.