June 3, 2009Taylor Receives 2009 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award
Richard Taylor, Professor of Informatics and Director of the Institute for Software Research, was presented the 2009 ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) Outstanding Research Award at the International Conference on Software Engineering Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
The Outstanding Research Award annually recognizes an individual who has made significant and lasting research contributions to the theory or practice of software engineering.
An example of contributions that Taylor and his research group have made over the years concerns the design and operation of Web protocols and applications, which have had transformational impact on the modern-day Web, and affects anyone who "surfs the internet."
Taylor’s design principles shaped the critical properties that have enabled the dramatic transformation of the Web we have witnessed, particularly principles by which these Web protocols and applications are to be created. His contributions and careful design addressing a host of often competing concerns, directly impacts how the Web now drives global business, houses the ubiquitous world of constant online communication and socialization, and is foundational for all of the emerging e-sciences.
Over the past decade, Taylor has guided a group of graduate students who have been instrumental in shaping the Web as it is today:
ACM SIGSOFT provides a forum for computing professionals from industry, government and academia to examine principles, practices, and new research results in software engineering. SIGSOFT focuses on issues related to all aspects of software development and maintenance. Areas of special interest include: requirements, specification and design, software architecture, validation, verification, debugging, software safety, software processes, software management, measurement, user interfaces, configuration management, software engineering environments, and CASE tools. More: http://www.sigsoft.org/.
- Roy Fielding is first author of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Specification (HTTP/1.1), which to this day governs how Web clients and servers interact.
- Jim Whitehead spearheaded the development of WebDAV, an extension to HTTP that governs collaborative authoring and versioning over the Web, a protocol upon which such widely used products as Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat rely every single day.
- Justin Erenkrantz is the president of the Apache Foundation, famously responsible for free, superbly engineered implementations of the infrastructure components upon which the modern Web rests, including Apache.
