PhD student Rangeet Pan and Hridesh Rajan have received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) 2020 for their work “On Decomposing a Deep Neural Network into Modules”. So far deep neural networks, the machine learning models used for deep learning, are thought of as monolithic machine learning models. This work shows for the first time that it is possible to decompose a deep neural network into parts so that these parts can be reused to create another deep neural network and replaced to improve the machine learning model.

Distinguished papers are given to at most 10% of the papers accepted at an ACM sponsored conference. ESEC/FSE is an internationally renowned forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in the field of software engineering. Along with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), it is widely recognized as the top-2 conferences in software engineering. ESEC/FSE brings together experts from academia and industry to exchange the latest research results and trends as well as their practical application in all areas of software engineering.