On the same day that Liam was born, I received news that one of my two papers published at the ICSE 2000 conference has been given the International Conference on Software Engineering’s Most Influential Paper Award for its impact on software engineering research over the past decade. The paper, A case study of open source software development: the Apache server, is co-authored by Audris Mockus, myself, and James Herbsleb. The MIP is an important award within the academic world; my thanks to the award committee and congrats to Audris and Jim. I wish I could have been there in South Africa for the presentation. This year’s award is shared with a paper by Corbett et al. on Bandera.

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.