Ahmed Hassan receives the 2020 TCSE New Directions Award from the IEEE Computer Society Council on Software Engineering

The IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) has awarded the 2020 TCSE New Directions Award to Dr. Ahmed Hassan of the School of Computing and Dr. Thomas Zimmermann of Microsoft Research.

Drs. Hassan and Zimmermann received recognition for their individual and combined contributions to establish the field of mining software repositories (MSR).  The field emerged from the recognition of the role that software repositories have in better understanding software engineering processes.  New and  innovative solutions for mining data were developed to improve developer productivity and software quality.  Over the past 10 years, the MSR community grew and became well-established in the field of software engineering among researchers worldwide.

Dr. Hassan comments on what this award means to him. He says: “many people helped along the way to create this very vibrant and impactful community! This is the inaugural award so they had lots of candidates and research areas, so it means a lot for the
MSR community to be recognized. I ran a large event 8 years ago on campus called MSR
Vision 2020 where we had over 120 attendees from all over the world to
discuss  the future of MSR. I never imagined we would be this large in 2020,
let alone in the middle of a global pandemic. We just ran the edition of MSR 2020 all online with some sessions having over 1000 viewers! ”

Congratulations Ahmed!

Note: This article originally appeared on the Queen's School of Computing website.