Interestingly, my other paper in ICSE 2000 was the first conference paper about REST, co-authored with my adviser, Dick Taylor. That must have caused some debate within the awards committee. As I understand it, the MIP award is based on academic citations of the original paper and any follow-up publication in a journal. Since I encouraged people to read and cite my dissertation directly, rather than the ICSE paper’s summary or its corresponding journal version, I am not surprised that the REST paper is considered less influential. However, it does make we wonder what would have happened if I had never published my dissertation on the Web. Would that paper have been cited more, or would nobody know about REST? shrug. I like the way it turned out.

The next two International Conferences on Software Engineering will be held in Hawaii (ICSE 2011), with Dick as the general chair, and Zürich (ICSE 2012). That is some fine scheduling on the part of the conference organizers! Fortunately, I have a pretty good excuse to attend both.