For the second consecutive year, Computer Science and Engineering Associate Professor Pooyan Jamshidi has received the Ten-Year Most Influential Paper Award at the annual Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS) conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
In the decade since publication, “Software Engineering Meets Control Theory,” has been cited more than 200 times and has served as the foundation for product lines at several technology startups.
“I was lucky to have the opportunity to work on this topic. It’s a hot area of research,” Jamshidi says. “It was nice to see the impact the paper made, and acknowledgement from those senior professors in our community is awesome for any researcher to see.”
Jamshidi’s paper, entitled was a collaboration between researchers from universities all over the world. The purpose of the research was to create a standardized process for developing software that was self-adaptive and capable of fixing its own problems as they arose, an idea that both software and control engineers have been trying to tackle for decades. The paper was one of the first Jamshidi completed after earning his Ph.D. in 2014.
“When building a system, these two things have totally different languages. In software engineering, you think about writing code; in controls you think about writing mathematical equations,” Jamshidi says. “The goal was to bridge this gap, to integrate code and mathematics.”
The advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the years since the paper’s publication have advanced the field significantly, but these original ideas endure in current and future research.
“The key idea is still relevant to developing reliable autonomous systems,” Jamshidi says. “We want the system to be reliable and have some guarantee of stability because we don’t want it to act randomly.”
The recognition came as a pleasant surprise for Jamshidi, who saw it as a chance to connect with old friends and colleagues.
“The thing that made me happy was seeing some of those old friends I haven’t seen for ten years,” Jamshidi says. “That collaboration is one of the happy moments I still remember when I look back.”