Basili Honored with Two Lifetime Achievement Awards

Victor Basili, a professor emeritus of computer science, has been honored with two prestigious awards recognizing his substantial contributions to software engineering and computer programming.

The first award, from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on Software Engineering (TCSE), is a Lifetime Achievement Award presented annually to an individual who has significant contributions to the software engineering community that have resulted in a real and lasting impact of at least 25 years.

Basili was recognized for his exemplary work in empirical software engineering and shaping the field from its inception. He was the first to claim that software engineering needed to follow the model of other physical sciences and develop an experimental paradigm.

A second award is from UNICO National, an organization that works to promote the image of Italian American heritage and culture by supporting charitable, scientific, cultural, educational and literary projects.

Basili received the organization’s Marconi Science Award, which is given annually to recognize a living scientist who exemplifies Nobel Prize recipient Guglielmo Marconi’s vast scientific and creative accomplishments through their own life and achievements.

Basili received this year’s Marconi award for his groundbreaking work in computer programming—particularly for his research and scholarship in measuring, evaluating and improving the software development process and product for more than 45 years.

Basili joined the University of Maryland in 1970 as an assistant professor of computer science and served as chair of the department from 1982–1988. He has been a member of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies since it was founded in 1984. In 1998, he founded the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering–Maryland, where he served as executive director until 2004, and is currently a senior research fellow. Basili was also one of the founders and principals in the Software Engineering Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) from 1976–2001.

Basili is an IEEE and ACM Fellow and a recipient of numerous awards including the 1989 and 2012 NASA Group Achievement Award, a 1990 NASA/GSFC Productivity Improvement and Quality Enhancement Award, the 1993 University of Texas Department of Computer Science’s Distinguished Alumnus Award, the 1997 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mathematics and Computer Science by the Washington Academy of Sciences, the 2000 Outstanding Research Award from ACM SIGSOFT, the 2003 Harlan Mills Award from the IEEE Computer Society, and the Fraunhofer Medal in 2007.

Basili has authored over 250 journal and refereed conference papers, given over 50 keynote addresses, and served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and as an editor of the Journal of Systems and Software. He was also founding co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering.

—Story by Melissa Brachfeld, UMIACS communications group