Dr. Shuai Wang Received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

At the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2023), the paper, "PHYFU: Fuzzing Modern Physics Simulation Engines", co-authored by Dr. Shuai Wang and his PhD students Dongwei Xiao and Zhibo Liu, received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. This work is independently conducted at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Physics simulation engines are computer software that simulate behavior of physical systems, such as robots and aircrafts under air flow. The past few decades have witnessed a surge in the use of physical simulators in production environments, including computer graphics, gaming, VR, and various robotic tasks. Given the diverse applications of physics simulators, bugs in these systems can have negative results, ranging from undesired outcomes in recreational games to fatal consequences in safety-critical sectors like surgery robots. However, no existing systematic approaches to reveal bugs in physics simulation engines have been proposed, leaving many hidden and potentially harmful bugs undetected. To fill this gap, Dongwei and the others, for the first time, designed a fuzzing framework named "PHYFU" to uncover errors in physics simulators. By proposing a principled, clear testing oracle on the basis of Physics Laws, PHYFU effectively and efficiently uncovered over 5,000 errors from widely-used modern (commercial) physics simulators produced by NVIDIA, Google, Standford, and MIT.

The ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award is a highly regarded honor in the software engineering community, recognizing research papers that demonstrate outstanding technical contribution, originality, and impact on the field. Each year, the Program Committee of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) carefully evaluates submissions to identify papers that meet the highest standards of quality and relevance. In ASE 2023, only 7% of all accepted papers were selected for this prestigious award, representing the top 1.5% of all submissions.

Congratulations to Dr. Shuai Wang, Mr. Xiao and Mr. Liu.

For more information on the paper, please refer to the official announcement.

The ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award