Marek Gibiec, Adam Czauderna, and Dr. Jane Cleland-Huang were awarded an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, held this September in Belgium. Their work was part of a long-term project funded by the National Science Foundation and Siemens Corporate Research to automate the software traceability process through the application of machine learning and data mining techniques.

The work described in this particular paper utilizes novel web-mining techniques to modify the terms found in the HIPAA technical safeguards in order to improve the ability to automatically trace these safeguards into the specifications of healthcare related products. The ultimate goal of the research is to automate the task of demonstrating compliance of complex and safety-critical software systems to relevant regulatory codes. This is the second ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award received by this research team in 2010.

Marek is currently a student in the MS in Computer Science program, while Adam is a recent graduate of the program and currently employed full-time at DePaul’s Systems and Requirements Engineering Center (SAREC) on a traceability project funded by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Jane Cleland-Huang is director of SAREC and Associate Professor of Software Engineering at DePaul.