Overall, the output of the EPIC project has been disseminated thought the production of over 100 scholarly peer-reviewed articles, published in the most renewed software engineering venues.
The EPIC's output received considerable media attention, 7 international research awards and Professors Harman and Sarro received 5 career awards in recognition of their outstanding work.
The research carried out has also attracted considerable media coverage. EPIC’s work has not only significantly pushed the boundaries of the state-of-the-art research, but has also had a significant impact on society. For example, automatic repair have been applied at scale at Meta (formerly Facebook), where they have automatically found and fixed real software bugs in tens of millions of lines of production software code, improving the communications systems used by over 2.5 billion people worldwide. Automatically finding and fixing bugs, means that they never reach production, and no user is ever impacted. The approach also frees up developers’ time so that they can use their considerable human ingenuity on new features rather than the tedious and time-consuming task of finding and fixing faults. Harman also worked on web enabled simulation, which extends the principle of automated software fault finding and fixing to so-called social bugs. With this new development Harman’s EPIC project ideas may tackle, not only bugs that impede individual users experience, but also the ways in which one user may use software to harm another user.
Awards
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE/ACM ICSE 2024
IEEE Best paper award at IEEE/ACM ESEM 2024
Best RENE Paper Award at IEEE SANER 2024
Best Paper Award at SSBSE 2024 Challenge
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR 2023
Best Paper Award at SSBSE 2021 Challenge
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Artifact Award at ICSE 2021
ACM Outstanding Research award to Mark Harman. The top ACM award for SE
IEEE Harlan Mills award to Mark Harman. The top IEEE award for SE
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering to Mark Harman. The highest honours an engineer can received in the UK
IEEE CS TCSE Rising star Award 2021 to Federica Sarro. The top IEEE award for young SE academics
LERO Parnas Fellowship to Federica Sarro - Highest recognition for software engineering researchers in Ireland
Keynotes (selection)
ISSTA 2019 opening keynote by M. Harman.
ICSE 2019 keynote by Mark Harman
POPL 2019 opening keynote
ICPE 2023 opening keynote by F. Sarro
RE 2023 keynote by F. Sarro
Media Coverage
SapFix was covered by over 20 media outlets including Forbes, SD Times, CNET, SiliconANGLE, TechCrunch, the Verge, Tom's Guide.
Harman's Interview with Sam Shead: 10-2-2019 Forbes article
Harman's Interview with Michael Martinez for the IEEE Computer Society
Magazine feature: IEEE Spectrum interview and write up by: Amy Nordrum. Her article was published on January 2019.
Over 60 different media outlets reported on the development of web enabled simulation at Facebook including:
The Verge:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/15/21221992/facebook-wes-simulation-research-paper-bots-scammers-new-feature(se abrirá en una nueva ventana) The Telegraph:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/04/15/facebook-reveals-has-hidden-parallel-social-network-filled-bots/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana) MIT technology review:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/15/999871/facebook-ai-bot-simulation/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana) The Independent newspaper:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-secret-social-network-ai-bots-simulation-scams-trolls-a9468026.html(se abrirá en una nueva ventana) Newsweek:
https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-bot-universe-trolls-scammers-web-enabled-simulation-ww-social-media-1498287(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)Sarro's Interview with Tim Menzies for the IEEE Software Magazine 2024
