Friday, 6/30/2017
Rui Pereira, student from the Doctoral Programme in Informatics MAP-i and researcher from the High Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) of the School of Engineering of the University of Minho (EEUM), reached the second place in the ACM Student Research Competition at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2017.
The article entitled "Locating energy hotspots in source code", which was initially submitted in the form of a long abstract paper, was presented in a second evaluation phase in poster form at the 39th ICSE, one of the most important conferences in the field of Software Engineering, and it was carried out under the project Green Software Laboratory (GSL), a national project financed by FCT.
The work presented, throughout the three stages of the competition, is of a language independent analysis technique to detect energy inefficient fragments in the source code of a software system. Based on fault localization principles, the tool named SPELL – SPectrum-based Energy Leak Localisation associates different percentages of responsibility of energy consumption to different source code components. Thus, it points the developer's attention to the most critical hot spots on a source code level (these being anywhere from packages, methods, or lines of code), to allow him to optimise the energy efficiency of their program. Ultimately, the tool has been shown to help developers become energy-aware when developing, while also helping analyse, interpret and optimize the energy consumption of a program, as is the motivation behind the GSL project.
In this evaluation phase, along with nine other candidates, Rui Pereira made a small public presentation and exhibition of the poster during a special session of the same conference, before a jury composed of five ICSE and ACM members. Only four researchers advanced to the final phase of the competition. In the third and final phase, with a research talk at ICSE, Rui Pereira achieved the second place in the competition, losing the first place to a researcher from Carnegie Mellon University, and prior Apple researcher. In this phase, three were awarded a medal. The next round will be in the Grand Final of the ACM Research Competition, where all medalists participate in the ACM Student Research Competition. This round will be during the ACM Awards Banquet an event where, as a general rule, the Turing Award is presented, that is, a prize awarded by ACM to a person who contributed significantly to the area of computing.
It is important to mention that this competition – sponsored by Microsoft – offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.
This edition of ICSE was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from May 20 to 28 and has an annual membership of approximately 1600 participants.
+ info: http://haslab.uminho.pt/
