Recognition

Awards

ICPC recognizes work that has shaped program comprehension research over a decade, early-career researchers who are shaping its future, and the strongest papers of each year's program.

Most Influential Paper

Each year the conference honors the paper from the ICPC held ten years earlier that has had the greatest influence on research and practice since. The award is selected by a committee appointed by the general and program chairs.

AwardedPaperAuthorsOriginally
2026 A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors Guilherme Avelino, Leonardo Passos, Andre Hora, Marco Tulio Valente ICPC 2016
2025 I know what you did last summer: an investigation of how developers spend their time Roberto Minelli, Andrea Mocci, Michele Lanza ICPC 2015
2024 Automatic documentation generation via source code summarization of method context Paul W. McBurney, Collin McMillan ICPC 2014
2023 Automatic generation of natural language summaries for Java classes Laura Moreno, Jairo Aponte, Giriprasad Sridhara, Andrian Marcus, Lori Pollock, K. Vijay-Shanker ICPC 2013
2022 Measuring programming experience Janet Siegmund, Christian Kästner, Jörg Liebig, Sven Apel, Stefan Hanenberg ICPC 2012
2021 Design Defects Detection and Correction by Example Marouane Kessentini, Wael Kessentini, Houari Sahraoui, Mounir Assaf, Ali Ouni ICPC 2011
2020 On the Equivalence of Information Retrieval Methods for Automated Traceability Link Recovery Rocco Oliveto, Malcom Gethers, Denys Poshyvanyk, Andrea De Lucia ICPC 2010
2019 To CamelCase or Under_score David Binkley, Marcia Davis, Dawn Lawrie, Christopher Morrell ICPC 2009
2018 NiCad: Accurate Detection of Near-Miss Intentional Clones Using Flexible Pretty-Printing and Code Normalization Chanchal K. Roy, James R. Cordy ICPC 2008
2017 Combining Formal Concept Analysis with Information Retrieval for Concept Location in Source Code Denys Poshyvanyk, Andrian Marcus ICPC 2007
2016 What's in a Name? A Study of Identifiers Dawn Lawrie, Christopher Morrell, Henry Feild, David Binkley ICPC 2006
2015 Concise and Consistent Naming Florian Deißenböck, Markus Pizka IWPC 2005
2014 An Effectiveness Measure for Software Clustering Algorithms Zhihua Wen, Vassilios Tzerpos IWPC 2004
2012 The Role of Concepts in Program Comprehension Václav Rajlich, Norman Wilde IWPC 2002

Know a recipient missing from this list? Corrections are welcome; contact the steering committee.

Václav Rajlich Early Career Achievement Award

Established in 2024 through a gift from the Rajlich family and organized with Wayne State University, the award honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions to program comprehension early in their career, within seven years of their highest degree. The recipient receives an honorarium, travel support to attend ICPC, and gives a colloquium at Wayne State. Nominations are reviewed by the steering committee; the call opens each winter on the conference website.

Distinguished papers

ACM SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE distinguished paper awards recognize the top papers of each year's technical program, as selected by the program committee.

2026

2022

2021

2020

Distinguished paper lists are published on each year's conference website; this page collects the years the steering committee has on record.