Vasilescu and Team Tapped for ICSE Distinguished Paper Award

Bogdan Vasilescu, faculty member in the Institute for Software Research, was recently tapped to receive an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), to be held between May 25 - 31 in Montreal, Canada.

Alongside his PhD student, Sophie Qiu; his former Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) student, Anita Brown; and his collaborators, Alexander Nolte and Alexander Serebrenik; Vasilescu’s work “Going Farther Together: The Impact of Social Capital on Sustained Participation in Open Source” clenched the noteworthy honor.

Noting that sustained participation by contributors in open-source software is crucial to the longevity of said projects as well as the professional development of individual contributors, Vasilescu and his group set out to examine empirically how the social networks that open-source contributors form over time through repeated participation in open-source projects impact their chances of long-term engagement. Building on established theory from the social sciences, and combining large-scale mining and analysis of trace data with a user survey, the group made two discoveries. First, higher social capital associates with prolonged engagement for all contributors Second, on average women benefit more than men from participating in teams with high diversity of expertise.

Established in 1975, the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering is widely regarded as the foremost global conference on software engineering. The annual event brings together hundreds of  researchers, practitioners, and educators to present, discuss, and debate the most recent research results, innovations, trends, and concerns in the field of software engineering.

To learn more about work by Vasilescu and his team, please visit the Socio-Technical Research Using Data Excavation Lab (STRUDEL).