Most Influential Paper Award - ICSE 1997

Each year the current program committee for ICSE reviews the papers from the ICSE that was held 10 years ago to select the paper they consider to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of software engineering since its original publication. The Most Influential Paper award is presented at ICSE to the authors of this paper from the ICSE of 10 years ago. The award is jointly sponsored by ACM/SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE.

In this tradition, Wilhelm Schäfer has acted as the Most Influential Paper Award organizer and facilitated the decision. The ICSE 2007 PC considered technical papers presented at ICSE 1997 in Boston. All PC members who did not have any conflicts of interests with the papers of ICSE 1997 were invited to nominate papers and, once a shortlist of nominated papers was produced, the eligible PC members reviewed and voted for the most influential paper. With a very large majority, the ICSE 2007 PC voted to award the Most Influential Paper award to the following paper of ICSE 1997:

Designing Distributed Applications with Mobile Code Paradigms, by Antonio Carzaniga, Gian Pietro Picco and Giovanni Vigna.

This paper identifies the principles of mobile code that enable, for example applets, AJAX style user interfaces, mobile agents and many other distributed system technologies. An archival version of the paper was published with the title Understanding Code Mobility in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 24(5):342-361. Both the TSE and ICSE papers are extremely highly cited and have influenced a large body of work.

The authors of this paper have been invited to give a retrospective talk on the subject, which will be held on Thursday May 24th 2007 @ 4:00PM in Salon D, during the awards ceremony. Title and abstract of this talk can be found below.

Is Code Still Moving Around? Looking Back at a Decade of Code Mobility

Antonio Carzaniga

Gian Pietro Picco

Giovanni Vigna

Abstract
In the mid-nineties, mobile code was on the rise and, in particular,there was a growing interest in autonomously moving code components,called mobile gents. In 1997, we published a paper that introduced the concept of mobile code paradigms, which are design patterns that involve code mobility. The paradigms highlighted the locations of code, resources, and execution as first-class abstractions. This characterization proved useful to frame mobile code designs and technologies, and also as a basis for a quantitative analysis of applications built with them. Ten years later, things have changed considerably. We present our view on how mobile code has evolved, and discuss which paradigms succeeded or failed in effectively supporting distributed applications.

Antonio Carzaniga Antonio Carzaniga is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano, Switzerland, and also holds an Assistant Research Professor position at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1994 and 1999, respectively. Antonio Carzaniga has worked in the areas of software process, mobile code, distributed configuration management, testing and validation of distributed systems, and distributed publish/subscribe middleware. Currently, his primary research interests are in the design and realization of advanced communication systems (e.g., content-based networking) with a particular emphasis on both the algorithmic aspects of routing protocols, and the engineering methods that make those systems and protocols usable, scalable, robust, and secure.

Gian Pietro Picco is an Associate Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technology of University of Trento, Italy. Previously, he has been on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA (1998-1999) and Politecnico di Milano, Italy (1999-2006). He received his M.Sc. from Politecnico di Milano (1993) and Ph.D. from Politecnico di Torino, Italy (1998). He has served as the Program Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Agents in 2001. The goal of his current research is to support the development of modern distributed systems through the investigation of appropriate programming abstractions, along with communication protocols to efficiently support them. His work spans the research fields of software engineering, middleware, and networking, and is geared in particular towards wireless sensor networks, mobile computing, and large-scale distributed systems.

Giovanni Vigna is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California in Santa Barbara. His current research interests include web security, intrusion detection and correlation, vulnerability assessment, and malware analysis. He also edited a book on Security and Mobile Agents and authored one on Intrusion Correlation. He has been the Program Chair of the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2003). Finally, he is known for organizing and running an inter-university Capture The Flag hacking context that every year involves dozens of institutions around the world. Giovanni Vigna received his M.S. with honors and Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1994 and 1998, respectively. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.