[IGSTK-Developers] DEBUGGING EXPERT WINS ACM DOCTORAL DISSERTATION AWARD

[Luis Ibanez]

http://campus.acm.org/public/pressroom/press_releases/3_2006/liblit.cfm

ACM
The Association for Computing Machinery

DEBUGGING EXPERT WINS ACM DOCTORAL DISSERTATION AWARD

New York, NY, March 15, 2006 - Ben Liblit, an assistant professor of
computer science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, has won the
2005 Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM) for his study on understanding and fixing computer
"bugs" in the real world. His dissertation, "Cooperative Bug Isolation,"
describes a system to support debugging based on feedback from actual
users. He was nominated by the University of California, Berkeley.
Liblit will receive the Doctoral Dissertation Award and its $5,000 prize
at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on May 20, at the Westin St. Francis
Hotel in San Francisco.

Liblit's dissertation proposes a method for leveraging the key strength
of user communities - their overwhelming numbers. His approach uses
sparse random sampling rather than complete data collection for
gathering information from the experiences of large numbers of software
end users. It also simultaneously ensures that the observed data is an
unbiased, representative subset of the complete program behavior across
all runs.

                   http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/


The dissertation addresses several practical challenges to collecting
feedback from real code, including privacy and security issues, as well
as user interaction and informed consent. It presents a suite of new
algorithms for statistical debugging, which involves finding and fixing
software errors based on statistical analysis of sparse feedback data.
The paper also reports initial results from an actual public deployment
of the proposed system.