Prof. Dr. Lionel Briand, researcher at the Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), has been named this year's recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills Award – one of the most prestigious awards in the field of software engineering.

The award recognizes researchers and practitioners who have demonstrated long-standing contributions to information science theory and practice, with a focus on the application of sound theory to software engineering practice. The award was given to Briand in recognition of his practical and fundamental contributions to model-based software testing and validation.

The award ceremony took place on June 8, 2012, at the International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE) in Zurich, Switzerland - the flagship software engineering conference. "We are thrilled that Lionel Briand has being honoured with this very prestigious award," says SnT's Director, Prof. Dr. Björn Ottersten. "In many ways it's a testament to Lionel Briand's outstanding scientific and practical contributions - and to our ability to attract one of the world’s leading software engineering scientists to SnT and Luxembourg!"

Our modern-day world and the range of industry sectors - from the automotive industry to medical devices - depend to an increasingly greater extent on the existence of complex software systems. This includes software-controlled manufacturing, vehicles, devices, logistics centres, telephone and internet nodes - even over major financial hubs like Luxembourg, London, and New York. Such systems need to be highly dependable, reliable, robust, safe, and secure. “Software-intensive systems have become so complex that software engineers often have great difficulty ensuring their systems’ dependability,” says Lionel Briand. “To deliver predictably dependable software-intensive systems that are at the same time reasonably cost-effective, we need proven software verification and testing technologies that are highly automated.”

Briand, who has been working on such challenges for many years, found the perfect fit for his research when, in January 2012, he was named Scientific Director of SnT's new Software Verification and Validation Laboratory. The new laboratory is supported by a Program Excellence Award for Research in Luxembourg (PEARL) grant from the Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR). Until the end of 2011, Briand headed the Certus Software Verification and Validation Centre at Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway, where he led and conducted research in close collaboration with partners from industry. (...)

Contact for journalists:

•  Lionel Briand or 
• communication@uni.lu, T. 00352 46 66 44 6563, 
• www.uni.lu/snt