The New Directions Award was given in recognition of contributions to symbolic execution for test generation and program repair.

Prof Cristian Cadar from the Department of Computing’s Software Reliability Group, together with National University of Singapore’s Prof Abhik Roychoudhury, have received the IEEE Technical Committee on Software Engineering’s New Directions Award for 2022 which is presented annually to an individual or team who have made substantial contributions to software engineering research or practice, with these contributions moving the field in a new direction. 

The New Directions Award was given in recognition of their contributions to symbolic execution for test generation and program repair, which have positively influenced research and practice. 

Prof Cadar’s research work in software engineering focuses on innovative techniques for improving the quality and dependability of software, with an emphasis on building practical tools for automatically finding software bugs, generating high-quality test suites, verifying the absence of certain types of bugs, and allowing applications to survive critical errors. The new research directions recognised by this award, currently funded by a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant, are on ensuring the safe and secure evolution of software.  

“I am honoured to receive this award from the software engineering community, and I would like to thank my research group and collaborators, as well as the broader community that works on the important topic of program analysis for evolving software.”  

The New Directions Award is presented both at a virtual and an in-person award ceremony at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2022, the flagship software engineering conference taking place this May both online and in-person in Pittsburgh, USA.