7 May 2019 – NUS Computing Professor Dong Jin Song and his former PhD students, Dr Sun Jun and Dr Liu Yang, won the 20 Year ICFEM Most Influential System Award on 14 November 2018. The award was presented at the 20th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods (ICFEM) in Gold Coast, Australia.
The Most Influential System Award was one of four awards given out at the conference for influential work that has been widely cited and used by both academia and industry. The three other awards include the Most Influential Person Award, the Most Influential Paper Award, and the Outstanding Service Award.
The team received the prestigious award for developing the Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT), a multi-domain model checker. PAT was first developed by Dr Sun, Dr Liu and Professor Dong in 2007 and their system has attracted more than 4,300 registered users from over 1,000 organisations around the world. The system has been used to verify highly complex algorithms and has discovered previously unknown bugs in popular published election protocol. It has also been used to find unknown security flaws in several real-world web systems used by millions of users. The system has over one million lines of C# source code and has been described in over 100 publications and 12 PhD theses. Organisations that has used PAT include Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Toyota, Microsoft, Huawei, and more.
“It has been a privilege to have won this award with two of my former PhD students Jun and Yang, with whom I still actively collaborate with,” said Professor Dong.
Dr Sun completed his PhD in Computer Science back in 2006 and is currently an Associate Professor with the Singapore Management University, while Dr Liu graduated from NUS Computing in 2010 and is now an Associate Professor with the Nanyang Technological University.
