VERSEN PhD Awards 2018

22-Mar-2019

During ICT.Open, for the first time the VERSEN PhD award has been handed out. The members of the jury, Jan Friso Groote, Slinger Jansen, and Patricia Lago, used the following criteria for judging:

• Novelty to and impact in the field promoted by VERSEN.
• Timeliness.
• Quality of the thesis report and associated artifacts.
• Methodological approach and execution.

The winners of the VERSEN PhD award are:

1. Paul Fiterau Brostean (Radboud University Nijmegen) with the thesis "Active Model Learning for the Analysis of Network Protocols", supervised by Frits Vaandrager. An outstanding thesis that uses foundational techniques for a common, relevant, and urgent software engineering problem.
2. Elvira Maria Arvanitou (University of Groningen) with the thesis "Proposing and Empirically Validating Change Impact Analysis Metrics", supervised by Paris Avgeriou. A significant contribution to the domain of metrics in software engineering, while embracing the weaknesses of metrics.
3. Garm Lucassen (University of Utrecht) with the thesis "Understanding User Stories", supervised by Fabiano Dalpiaz. A formal approach towards a common phenomenon in engineering problems, that didn't obviously lend itself to formalization, with a significant empirical component.