Congratulations to Paul Temple on winning the Most Influential Paper award at the VARIABILITY international conference, and to his co-authors (the DIVERSE and ARTISHAU teams)
Congratulations to Paul Temple (Associate Professor, University of Rennes), José Angel Galindo (Professor, University of Seville), Mathieu Acher (Professor, INSA Rennes), Jean-Marc Jézéquel (Professor, University of Rennes) for winning the Most Influential Paper Award at the VARIABILITY 2026 international conference, for their paper published in SPLC in 2016, ‘Using machine learning to infer constraints for product lines’
The committee selected this paper because it proposes an innovative approach based on machine learning to automatically identify the constraints required to generate valid configurations of a software product line (SPL). This aims to reduce the manual effort involved in maintaining and enriching knowledge relating to existing product lines, as some of these constraints are often unknown or require the input of experts in the relevant software domain.
This paper has also opened up new avenues combining data-driven machine learning and configurable systems, extending well beyond the team that authored it.
Today, the approach remains valid and is evolving in line with the rapid advances we are seeing in AI; it may even find new applications in this field.
VARIABILITY – International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, Product Lines, and Configuration – will take place in late September in Cyprus. It is the result of the merger of three leading conferences dedicated to variability, configuration and the reuse of software and systems: SPLC (the International Conference on Software and Systems Product Lines, now in its 29th year), VaMoS (the International Conference on Modelling Variability in Software-Intensive Systems, now in its 19th year) and ICSR (the International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, now in its 22nd year)