Caccamo, Xie named IEEE Fellows

CS @ ILLINOIS Professors Marco Caccamo and Tao Xie were both recently named Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Xie was recognized “for contributions to software testing and analytics,” while IEEE recognized Caccamo’s contributions “to the theory and applications of hard real-time multicore computing.”

Only a small number of IEEE members are selected as fellows, recognizing extraordinary contributions in any of the organization’s fields of interest. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional society and publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in electrical and electronics engineering and computer science.

“I am very grateful for such honor from the IEEE,” said Xie, who is a Willett Faculty Scholar. “It is a recognition of the achievements that my students, collaborators, and I have made in the past years. I really appreciate their contributions to help gain this recognition.”

Xie leads the Automated Software Engineering research group and his work focuses on software engineering.

Xie’s research has included intensive collaboration with industry partners, among them the creation of the IntelliTest automatic testing tool, created with Microsoft Research and shipped with the Enterprise Edition of Microsoft Visual Studio in 2015 and 2017; the Code Hunt educational gaming platform widely used in programming contests, also created with Microsoft Research; automatic testing tools being deployed to improve the quality of the WeChat app, developed with engineers from the Chinese firm Tencent; and pioneering work on data-driven software analytics with Microsoft Research Asia.

In 2016 Xie was honored with a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award.

Caccamo is the principal investigator at the Real Time and Embedded System Laboratory. His research focuses on real-time operating systems, scheduling, and networks, with an emphasis on avionics and automotive systems.

“I consider it an important milestone in my career, the result of about 10 years of use-inspired basic research in the area of hard, real-time, multi-core computing,” Caccamo said, thanking his PhD students and collaborators for their contributions to that research. “This, though, is not an arrival point, but rather the beginning of a new phase in my career where I can look at even more challenging problems and set even a bolder research agenda in the broad field of safety critical embedded and real-time computing.”

“I hope my work will contribute to the development of international standards and engineering practices that can be applied by the embedded industry to develop a new generation of safety critical and real-time systems like autonomous automobiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, the computing infrastructure in digital manufacturing, and more,” he said.

Earlier this year, Caccamo was recognized with a Humboldt Professorship.