Dongmei Zhang, Executive Vice President of Microsoft Research Asia, and Tao Xie, Chair Professor of the School of Computer Science of Peking University, recently won the "Foundational Contribution Award" from the Mining Software Repositories Conference (MSR 2022), an international academic conference at the intersection of software engineering and data science. The reason for the award was: "They have made significant contributions to pioneering new areas of software analytics research with pioneering results and techniques that." have had high industrial impact”）。

This award is one of two annual awards established by the repository mining community since 2017 (the other being the Early Career Achievement Award) to recognize individuals or groups that have made foundational contributions to the field of software warehouse mining that helps many others, not limited to the software warehouse mining community, to build on the latest research advances. This contribution type can be a tool, dataset, repository, or new research area being opened.

The two scientists had the foresight to pioneer the new field of Software Analytics, and over the next decade or so worked with their research team to continue to promote the development of research and practice in this field, which has had a profound impact in academia and industry.