A team of software engineering researchers has won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FORGE 2026, the 3rd ACM International Conference on AI Foundation Models and Software Engineering, held as part of ICSE 2026, the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
The award recognizes recent master’s graduate Evelien Riddell, whose thesis forms the foundation of the paper, along with MMath student James Riddell, PhD student Gengyi Sun, research engineer Michał Antkiewicz and Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki. Their paper is titled “Stalled, Biased, and Confused: Uncovering Reasoning Failures in LLMs for Cloud-based Root Cause Analysis.”
Based on Evelien’s master’s research, the work developed a controlled framework to evaluate how effectively large language models perform root cause analysis, the process of identifying the underlying source of system failures, in complex cloud environments
Their findings show that while current large language models often generate plausible diagnoses, their underlying reasoning is often flawed, with accuracy deteriorating as agentic complexity increases. These results suggest that improving root cause analysis will require more than simply adding agents. Instead, it will depend on designing systems that reason carefully, systematically, and transparently.
Evelien Riddell is a recent master’s graduate from the Cheriton School of Computer Science. She conducted this award-winning research under the supervision of Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki, who leads the Waterloo Intelligent Systems Engineering Lab. In addition to her MMath degree, she holds a Bachelor of Science in physics and computer science from the University of British Columbia.
Read the full article on the Cheriton School of Computer Science's website.