LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 04 February 2019 – Mark Harman, engineering manager at Facebook London and professor of computer science at University College London (UCL), has been selected to receive the IEEE Computer Society’s 2019 Harlan D. Mills Award.
Harman has been acknowledged “for fundamental contributions throughout software engineering, including seminal contributions in establishing search-based software engineering, reigniting research in slicing and testing, and founding genetic improvement.”
"I am honored and humbled to receive this award,” said Harman. “I have been very fortunate to work with so very many exceptionally talented and dedicated scientists, engineers and researchers. The fact that computational search is now so deeply ingrained in the Software Engineering literature is a testament to their dedication, insights and skills. It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures (and an enormous privilege) to continue to have the chance to work with the international scientific community on the intellectual development of this field.”
Harman is known for his scientific work on Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE), source code analysis, software testing, app store analysis, and empirical software engineering.
A co-founder of the SBSE field—an active and impactful research area with authors from more than 40 countries—Harman’s primary focus of current work is Automated Software Engineering research and practice, in both industrial and scientific communities.
Harman manages the Sapienz team at Facebook London, where Sapienz has been deployed to continuously test Facebook's suite of Android and iOS apps (including Facebook, Messenger, Workplace, and Instagram), automatically finding thousands of bugs in multimillion lines of code powering the social media apps used by over a billion people worldwide every day.
Harman’s scientific work is supported by Facebook, an ERC advanced fellowship grant, and the UK EPSRC funding council.
The Harlan D. Mills Award recognizes researchers and practitioners who have demonstrated long-standing, sustained, and meaningful contributions to the theory and practice of the information sciences, focusing on contributions to the practice of software engineering through the application of sound theory. Further information about the award, including a list of past winners, may be found
here.
The award consists of a $3,000 honorarium and an invitation to give a talk during the 2019 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE). The award will be presented during the main conference, which will be held from 25 May through 31 May in Montreal, QC, Canada.
