Dr. Charles Zhang's Research Group Received ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA 2022

At the 37th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2022), the paper, "Complexity-Guided Container Replacement Synthesis", co-authored by Dr. Charles Zhang and his students Chengpeng Wang and Wensheng Tang, as well as the CSE Ph.D. graduates Peisen Yao and Qingkai Shi, received the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award. This is the first SIGPLAN OOPSLA distinguished paper award in Hong Kong. The paper is a joint work with Ant Group.

Data structures such as maps and vectors are complex to use and often have performance problems. Built upon Pinpoint, a commercial static analysis framework previously also developed by Dr. Zhang's research group, Chengpeng and others created a new technique, Cres, that automatically synthesized 107 container usages to replace manual written ones, leading the efficiency improvements of 8.1% on average on twelve popular open-source projects. Notably, 71 replacements were confirmed and fixed by the developers. Cres has been integrated into the static analysis toolchain in Ant Group, automatically providing suggestions on container usage for developers.

OOPSLA, the Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, is the premier program language conference. Since 1986, OOPSLA has provided a forum where PL researchers, practitioners, and educators share their newest innovative ideas and discuss the trends, experiences, and issues in the area of programming language.

Congratulations to Dr. Zhang, Mr. Wang, Dr. Yao, Mr. Tang, and Dr. Shi.

For more information, please refer to the official announcement.