about awards ...

When I was a younger researcher, I was somewhat of an iconoclast. 😉

I paid little attention to institutions, associations and societies, and anything representing authority and the established order.

Probably a mix of lack of trust and interest, due to my background. In short, I was not too impressed though I liked my job and many of my colleagues.

For many years, I was not even a member of the ACM until someone suggested to nominate me for fellowship, and I had to tell him you had to be a member for five years to be nominated. He was surprised and puzzled. I was however an IEEE member, mostly to save on conference fees, and at some point, someone had to twist my arm to go for the IEEE fellowship nomination, which I must say I did not help prepare well the first time around, with the expected result ...

Then, over the years, I slowly realized that, for a research community to compete, within institutions or national funding organizations, fellowships and awards were very important. The more awards community members could be nominated for, at all levels of seniority and for various reasons, the better in terms of enabling them to compete for attention and recognition against other fields of research. Mathematicians, for example, give each others many "prizes" as they call them.

Of course, award selection processes are never perfect and there is a component of randomness and subjectivity. But it is unlikely for anybody to be repeatedly unlucky and eventually achievements get recognized.

I have at some point chaired the IEEE Harlan Mills award committee. I am always willing to help deserving members of the software engineering community in any way I can, through endorsements or letters of support for example. And I am all for the creation of new awards, such as the relatively recent IEEE TCSE awards. However, it is highly important for award committees and processes to be managed at the highest professional standards since achieving credibility takes time, but a few errors are usually sufficient to shatter reputations for a very long time.

So, let’s take awards and other forms of recognition seriously. Our research community needs them to obtain the visibility it deserves.

Lionel C. Briand is professor of software engineering and has shared appointments between (1) The University of Ottawa, Canada and (2) The SnT centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust, University of Luxembourg. In collaboration with colleagues, over 25 years, he has run many collaborative research projects with companies in the automotive, satellite, aeropsace, energy, financial, and legal domains. Lionel has held various engineering, academic, and leading positions in six countries. He was one of the founders of the ICST conference (IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, a CORE A event) and its first general chair. He was also EiC of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) for 13 years and led, in collaboration with first Victor Basili and then Tom Zimmermann, the journal to the top tier of the very best publication venues in software engineering. 

Lionel was elevated to the grades of IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow for his work on software testing and verification. He was granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award, the ACM SIGSOFT outstanding research award, and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award, respectively in 2012, 2022, and 2013. He received an ERC Advanced grant in 2016 — on the topic of modelling and testing cyber-physical systems — which is the most prestigious individual research award in the European Union. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) on "Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance". His research interests include: software testing and verification, applications of AI in software engineering, model-driven software development, requirements engineering, and empirical software engineering.