Information School Associate Professor Amy Ko has earned a 10-year most influential paper award from the International Conference on Software Engineering, one of the premier conferences on software engineering research.

ICSE selected Ko’s paper, "Debugging reinvented: asking and answering why and why not questions about program behavior,” as the most influential paper from about 60 published in 2008. The work, which Ko published as the last piece of her doctoral dissertation, spawned hundreds of innovations in debugging tools in academia and industry. It is the second time Ko has won a most influential paper award.

"It's a humbling award,” Ko said. “When I was finishing my Ph.D., I just hoped the work would be publishable. Seeing the hundreds of innovations that it inspired shows just how unpredictable impact can be."

The award carries an invitation for Ko to give a presentation on the research in June at ICSE 2018 in Gothenburg, Sweden. ICSE provides a forum for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the latest innovations and trends in software engineering.