ISR Researchers Receive Nod for Most Influential Paper in Adaptive Systems

Researchers from the Institute for Software Research will receive a Most Influential Paper award this week during the 15th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2020).

The 2006 paper, “Architecture-based self-adaptation in the presence of multiple objectives”, is co-authored by Shang-Wen Cheng (SE PhD ‘08), David Garlan, and Bradley Schmerl. In the paper, the researchers sought to propose a new language of adaptation for autonomic computing that was expressive enough to capture and represent the expertise of human operators in simulation. And, as a part of that work, the group developed the Rainbow framework to implement this unique approach.

Held in conjunction with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), SEAMS brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government, to address critical challenges of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems - including IoT technologies, cloud/edge computing, robotics, and smart environments.

SEAMS award committee representative, Dr. Zhenjiang Hu, noted that the paper was selected for its revolutionary approach. For their part, the researchers are humbled by the honor. “When we started out, our approach and the system we built (Rainbow) was pretty radical and unique - and thus one-of-a-kind. But today we have this SEAMS community where we now have many such systems” explains David Garlan. “Personally, one of the most gratifying outcomes of this work was seeing how this distinct community came together and began to focus on similar software engineering problems. And I and my colleagues are honored that Rainbow is being recognized as one of the stepping stones on the way to that wider ecosystem of ideas and systems.”