News

Computer science Ph.D. student Emerson Murphy-Hill won second prize in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) student research competition in conjunction with the International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), held in Portland on October 22-26, 2006. OOPSLA is the premier gathering of professionals from industry and academia, including practitioners, researchers, students, and educators—all sharing their experiences with object technology.

The title of Emerson’s award winning research is “Improving Usability of Refactoring Tools.” Emerson will compete in the ACM Grand Finals next spring. The research describes improvements to tools that perform computer program restructuring. These improvements are designed specifically to enhance the experience of the human programmer—to allow her to work more quickly, accurately, and enjoyably. Emerson anticipates that these improvements will be applicable to a variety of programmer tools and will result in better quality software.

Emerson’s research is part of a National Science Foundation funded project on multiple-view programming whose principal investigator is Professor Andrew Black.