Recently, the chairman of the ASE 2021 Most Influential Paper Award Committee, the top international conference on software engineering, announced that one of the two Most Influential Paper Awards at the conference was awarded to Xie Tao, chair professor of computer science and technology at Peking University, and Suresh Thummalapenta, a former North Carolina State University doctoral student (now at Microsoft), who he supervised in his early years. The winning paper was their collaboration with ASE's 2007 paper, PARSEWeb: A Programmer Assistant for Reusing Open Source Code on the Web. The ASE Most Influential Paper Award is the most influential paper selected from all papers presented at ASE conferences in the previous 15 years or so (including 14, 15, and 16 years ago). The ASE 2021 Most Influential Paper is the only paper selected from 181 accepted papers in ASE 2006, ASE 2007 and ASE 2008 (a total of 713 submissions in three years). Prof. Tao Xie and Dr. Suresh Thummalapenta will give an invited conference report at ASE 2021 to share the paper and its impact.
This most influential paper of ASE 2021 (published in ASE 2007) for the first time broadened the data sources of software products used in data mining and machine learning from a single or several open source systems to software products on the entire Internet, becoming a pioneer "pioneer" in the important industry and academic direction of big code, software big data. This broadening of the scope is based on the organic combination of code search and code mining, which effectively solves the problem of insufficient relevant data points in auxiliary software engineering tasks. This paper is also one of the earliest classic masterpieces in the field of big data-driven intelligent software development, using large code mining to achieve intelligent "programmer assistant". Its contribution to the technique effectively solved for the first time a data-driven software automation problem in a specific software development problem: how to automatically synthesize a sequence of method calls to obtain an object of a given class.
The paper currently has more than 510 citations (according to Google Scholar). Of the 14 papers that have won the ASE Most Influential Paper Award over the years, the paper currently ranks 5th in citations (according to Google Scholar), even though it was published later than other previous award-winning papers.
Professor Xie Tao is one of the first Chinese authors to win the ASE Most Influential Paper Award (two in total; Another ASE 2021 most influential paper was authored by Chinese scholar Xing Zhenchang, senior lecturer at the Australian National University. Professor Xie Tao is one of the four Chinese (the other three being Hongjun Zheng, Amy J. Ko and Xing Zhenchang) among the three international top conferences in software engineering ICSE, ESEC/FSE and ASE Most Influential Paper Award (ICSE MIP Award, ESEC/FSE Test of Time Award, ASE MIP Award).
