Congratulations to Perdita Stevens who has received a prestigious award
Perdita's paper "Bidirectional Model Transformations in QVT: Semantic Issues and Open Questions" has been selected as the most influential paper from MODELS 2007 in Vanderbilt, USA.
Background
A bidirectional transformation is a special kind of program whose job is to maintain consistency between two information sources. These could, for example, be diagrammatic models of different kinds of information about a software system to be built, e.g. what classes it is to contain on the one hand, and what tests must be run on it on the other.
When one model is changed, perhaps as a result of a decision by the team that uses it, the other may need to be changed as a result. The bidirectional transformation encodes, in one artefact, both the relationship that must be maintained between the models and how it should be restored when necessary.
This paper discussed the Object Management Group's QVT standard, which was intended to allow the development of bidirectional transformations, and some problems with it. It introduced a formal notation for bidirectional transformations, and some properties that these should obey, which have since become widely used.
It related this kind of bidirectional transformation to work that was going on in the field of programming languages, and pointed out some areas that needed further work.