Most Influential Paper Award

PRESS RELEASE

International Distinction: The most Influential Paper Award for
Georgios Gousios and Diomidis Spinellis

The paper "GHTorrent: GitHub's data from a firehose" by academics Georgios Gousios, Associate Professor of Software Technology at Delft University of Technology and Doctor of the Department of Management Science and Technology and Diomidis Spinellis, Professor of Software Technology at the Department, was recognized with the most Influential Paper Award. According to the evaluation committee of the international scientific conference "Mining Software Repositories" (MSR), among the papers published at the conference ten years ago, this paper was the most influential in the field of software technology during the decade 2012-2022.

The paper deals with building the infrastructure for scientific data analysis from the GitHub site, which is used by over 70 million developers. Many empirical research in the field of software technology requires the collection and editing of data from software repositories - infrastructures in which developers store the code they write and organize their collaboration. The popular GitHub service hosts such repositories. Although GitHub data is ideal for scientific research, it is not offered in a way that allows it to be easily analyzed. Authors Georgios Gousios and Diomidis Spinellis developed a system called GHTorrent, which with a series of original techniques captures GitHub torrent data, collects it, stores it and offers it to the scientific community in an efficient and flexible way. The infrastructure developed is widely used in scientific research in the field of software technology, thus having received hundreds of reports.