HASEL member, Associate Professor Ewan Tempero, received the Most Influential Paper award at Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC) 2023, held in Seoul, South Korea. The award recognised a paper published at APSEC 2010, titled “The qualitas corpus: A curated collection of java code for empirical studies”, for it’s impact on the field since its publication. The authors of the paper were Ewan Tempero, Craig Anslow, Jens Dietrich, Ted Han, Jing Li, Markus Lumpe, Hayden Melton, and James Noble.

The paper introduced a large, curated collection of open source Java systems. Since data collection is a significant undertaking, the corpus helped to reduce the cost of performing large empirical studies of code. It also supported comparison across studies since a consistent set of artefacts could be analysed. The community embraced the availability of this curated dataset, and the paper has been cited by over 500 other publications in the field. It has enabled studies across many different research areas.

Congratulations to all researchers involved!