Emma Tosch Won Best Paper Award at OOPSLA '14

The 4th year Ph.D. Student, Emma Tosch, won a Best Paper award at OOPSLA 2014, for her work on “Surveyman,” a first-of-its-kind software system for designing, deploying and automatically debugging surveys to improve their accuracy and trustworthiness. This is a huge honor especially given that OOPSLA is one of the top-tier conferences in the programming language research field! Her Surveyman work also won first place at the PLDI Student Research Competition.

Tosch’s advisor, professor Emery Berger, says, “Poor quality data can be seriously misleading. Flaws in survey design and deployment threaten the validity of results, making them untrustworthy. Until now, there has been no way to address these shortcomings automatically. But Surveyman, which is a free, publicly available and revolutionary new tool, can identify problems in any survey from the design stage onward. It should completely change the way people create surveys.”