Professor Matthew Lease, who has taught at the School of Information (iSchool) since 2009, has been recognized with two “Test of Time” awards. These awards recognize the enduring impact of research papers published over a decade ago. Congratulations on this significant accomplishment, Dr. Lease!
At the 2024 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP), Dr. Lease and his colleague were awarded the conference’s inaugural "Test of Time and Impact Award” for their paper SQUARE: A benchmark for research on computing crowd consensus, and Dr. Lease gave an hour-long talk, followed by a discussion of the work with the Program Chairs and Q&A with the audience. The paper, published at the AAAI HCOMP in 2013, presented an open-source shared task framework including benchmark datasets, defined tasks, standard metrics, and reference implementations with empirical results for popular methods at the time of publishing. This paper was instrumental in shaping work related to crowd consensus and efforts to improve response aggregation in crowdsourcing. It has been the most cited HCOMP paper during the last decade, and been widely used as a resource in crowdsourcing courses at different universities.
Dr. Lease was also recognized at the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) where he and his colleagues won the 2024 ASE "Most Influential Paper Award" for their paper titled Improving Bug Localization using Structured Information Retrieval, published at ASE 2013. Their research showed that Bug Localization Using information Retrieval (BLUiR) matches or outperforms a current state-of-the-art tool across applications considered, even when BLUiR does not use bug similarity data used by the other tool. The 2013 paper was selected for the Most Influential Paper Award for its insightfulness and thorough evaluation of the notion that structured IR based on code constructs enables more accurate bug localization.
Both papers were coauthored with graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin department of Computer Science, showcasing the interdisciplinary nature of information research. Well done on this milestone achievement, Dr. Lease! Of course, ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, was ahead of the game, already recognizing Dr. Lease as a Distinguished Member in 2022!