Tan earns ICSE 2026 Most Influential SEIP Paper Award

06-01-2026

Lin Tan, the Mary J. Elmore New Frontiers Professor of Computer Science (photo provided by Lin Tan).

A paper led by Lin Tan, the Mary J. Elmore New Frontiers Professor of Computer Science has received the Retrospective 2026 Most Influential Software Engineering in Practice Paper (MISP) Award from the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

The paper, “Online Defect Prediction for Imbalanced Data,” was originally published in 2015 as part of ICSE’s Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) track. The retrospective award recognizes the SEIP paper from ten years ago that has had the most significant and lasting impact on software engineering practice.

The SEIP track at ICSE highlights research that directly influences how software systems are built and maintained in real-world environments. The Most Influential SEIP Paper Award recognizes contributions that have demonstrated significant and long-lasting impact on industry practice.

Tan’s award-winning work addressed the challenge of finding software defects in situations where available data is highly imbalanced, a common issue in real-world software development. The research introduced techniques for improving the accuracy and usefulness of defect prediction models in practical settings.

Tan’s work has received additional recognition from the ICSE community this year. Her 2016 paper, “Automatically Learning Semantic Features for Defect Prediction,” was also selected to receive the ICSE 2026 Most Influential Paper (MIP) Award, which recognizes long-term research impact.

Together, these honors highlight the enduring influence of Tan’s work across both foundational research and practical software engineering applications.

ICSE is jointly sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Software Engineering and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Technical Community on Software Engineering.

 

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