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
Read the full story from Computer Science to learn more.