Darko Marinov

Yiling Lou, CS assistant professor, and her team, including CS professor Darko Marinov, won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award which will be presented at the ISSTA 2026 conference this month. The award, for Lou's first paper with her Illinois affiliation, is given to less than 10% of accepted papers and 2.5% of submitted papers. ISSTA is the leading research symposium on software testing and analysis. 

Darko Marinov, CS professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, along with his collaborators, Danny Dig, CS associate professor at the University of Colorado and then-CS PhD student, Can Comertoglu, Google Maps product leader and then-CS undergraduate, and Ralph Johnson, retired CS professor—were named the 2026 Test of Time Winners by the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objects (AITO) for their 2016 paper, "Automated Detection of Refactorings in Evolving Components." The annual award recognizes research contributions that have a lasting impact on the field.

At DASC 2025 PhD student Wentao Zhang co-advised by CS professors Darko Marinov and Tianyin Xu won First Place out of 239 papers at "The Best of" Conference Award for Digital Avionics Systems Conference for his first-author paper "An Open-Source Structural Coverage Tool for DO-178C Compliance" co-authored with collaborators from Boeing. Zhang has also given a series of talks with Boeing on Making Linux fly.

Illinois computer science PLFMSE PhD student Yang Chen (co-advised by Reyhan Jabbarvand and Darko Marinov) was ranked second at the ACM Student Research Competition at the flagship software engineering ICSE conference.

Illinois computer science PLFMSE PhD student Ali Ibrahimzada (advised by Reyhan Jabbarvand) was ranked third at the ACM Student Research Competition at the flagship software engineering ICSE conference.