Queen’s researcher Dr. Ahmed E. Hassan (School of Computing) has been awarded the 2020 TCSE New Directions Award from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering, along with Dr. Thomas Zimmermann (Microsoft Research). The 2020 TCSE New Directions Award recognizes those whose research contributions have moved software engineering in new directions. 

Hassan and Zimmerman established the field of Mining Software Repositories (MSR). Over the past two decades, MSR has advanced software engineering with innovations that have improved software engineering practices by uncovering interesting and valuable information about software systems and projects using vast amounts of technical and social data, such as run-time telemetry and personnel communication. Mining this valuable information has helped companies and open source projects worldwide improve software quality and developer efficiency. Today, the MSR conference is one of the top ten high impact venues in software engineering.

Dr. Hassan is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator, an NSERC Steacie Fellow, and the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Software Analytics. His research focuses on the intersection of systems and software engineering. Hassan leads the Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL) at Queen’s, where his team investigates approaches and techniques to support practitioners who are producing, maintaining and evolving   large-scale complex software systems which will allow more efficiency and predictability in results. Early tools and techniques developed by Hassan's team have been integrated into products that have been used worldwide.

For more information on Dr. Hassan’s research visit, the SAIL lab website.