Tan earns ICSE 2026 Most Influential Paper Award
03-11-2026
A research paper led by Lin Tan, the Mary J. Elmore New Frontiers Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2026 Most Influential Paper (MIP) Award from the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), the leading international venue for software engineering research.
The honored paper, “Automatically Learning Semantic Features for Defect Prediction,” was originally published at ICSE 2016. The Most Influential Paper Award recognizes the single paper from the conference ten years earlier that has had the greatest impact on the theory or practice of software engineering during the intervening decade. An extended version of this work, titled “Deep Semantic Feature Learning for Software Defect Prediction,” later appeared in the flagship journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
The award-winning paper is one of the first to apply deep learning to find software defects automatically, an approach that has influenced research at the intersection of machine learning and software engineering. The work was selected from a competitive field: ICSE 2016 accepted 101 papers out of 530 submissions.
The award will be presented during the ICSE 2026 Awards Session on April 15, where the authors have been invited to discuss the paper’s impact and share perspectives on future directions for the field.
This recognition comes alongside another ICSE honor for Tan’s research. Her 2015 paper, “Online Defect Prediction for Imbalanced Data,” was recently selected for the 2026 Retrospective Most Influential Software Engineering in Practice Paper (MISP) Award, which recognizes work that has had lasting impact on industry practice.
Together, the two awards highlight the broad influence of Tan’s work across both research and real-world software development.
ICSE is jointly sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Software Engineering and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Technical Community on Software Engineering. Widely regarded as the flagship conference in the field, ICSE is ranked the top venue for software systems research worldwide.
About the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University
Founded in 1962, the Department of Computer Science was created to be an innovative base of knowledge in the emerging field of computing as the first degree-awarding program in the United States. The department continues to advance the computer science industry through research. U.S. News & World Report ranks the department No. 16 and No. 19 overall in undergraduate and graduate computer science, respectively. Graduates of the program are able to solve complex and challenging problems in many fields. Our consistent success in an ever-changing landscape is reflected in the record undergraduate enrollment, increased faculty hiring, innovative research projects, and the creation of new academic programs. Learn more at cs.purdue.edu.