Five Paths to Lasting Influence: Celebrating Five UChicago CS Test of Time Award Recipients

At the heart of every leading computer science department is a key ambition: to produce research that shapes the future long after its debut. This year, the University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science celebrates an extraordinary distinction: five of its faculty members have received Test of Time Awards from major conferences, each recognizing work that continues to transform industries, scientific progress, and everyday technology.

Work that withstands the passage of time tells a unique story. In a discipline where trends evolve quickly and new ideas surface constantly, sustaining influence for a decade or more signals deep, foundational contribution. These awards shine a spotlight on discoveries that not only solved tough technical challenges, but also provided the sturdy backbone for modern tools and approaches.

Reimagining the Pace of Progress: Michael Franklin’s Bet on Streaming Data

Two decades ago, the idea of making real-time data decisions in seconds, rather than overnight, was viewed as ambitious. Michael Franklin, Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor at UChicago, and his colleagues asked why society should wait for answers when the world moves in real time. Their work, TelegraphCQ, was ahead of its time, predicting the era of streaming data that underpins applications in ride-sharing, financial fraud detection, and AI-powered agents.

Franklin recalled: “This is a classic example of a case where academics were willing to work on things decades before the market was ready for them.” Only years later did industry priorities and infrastructure catch up, proving the lasting value of the academic risk-taking at institutions like UChicago. Today, frameworks like Apache Spark, which draw lineage to Franklin’s research, help power systems relied upon globally.

Building the Backbone of Big Science: Ian Foster and GridFTP

Scientific discovery often depends on the ability to share massive datasets quickly and securely across borders and disciplines. Ian Foster, Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor, and his interdisciplinary team addressed this challenge with GridFTP, a secure, scalable data movement engine that soon became an international standard. GridFTP enabled projects from astronomy to genomics to proceed with speed and safety.

Foster noted, “The field has advanced dramatically in the past two decades, and this research has been a linchpin of our collective success, guiding us toward more efficient and powerful supercomputing solutions.” The impact of GridFTP is visible in countless scientific collaborations, as well as the everyday culture of data-driven research.

Opening Up the Internet’s Infrastructure: Nick Feamster’s PEERING Testbed

Diagnosing and fixing outages on the internet once seemed nearly impossible to those outside the network provider arena. Neubauer Professor Nick Feamster and his team changed this by building PEERING, a testbed that lets researchers experiment directly with internet routing on a live network. For the first time, academics could take an empirical approach to internet stability, security, and performance.

Feamster reflects: “We demonstrated that it was possible to do empirical research on the Internet’s routing infrastructure. Ultimately, lasting impact in this field requires building and measuring deployed systems.” Today, PEERING supports researchers globally as they develop fixes and innovations for a more robust internet.

Visual Data’s Unsung Hero: Robert Grossman and Graph-Theoretic Scagnostics

High-dimensional data visualization used to be a major hurdle for scientists and analysts. Robert Grossman, Frederick H. Rawson Distinguished Service Professor, along with Leland Wilkinson and Anushka Anand, provided the mathematical and computational foundation for scagnostics—graph-theoretic techniques that allow for intuitive, feature-driven visualization of complex datasets. Grossman played a central and distinguished role in not only formalizing these metrics, but also advancing their adoption well outside the academic sphere.

Their award-winning work has empowered the design of modern analytics platforms and visualization tools, benefiting everyone from biomedical researchers to business intelligence experts.

Adaptive Software for a Changing World: Hank Hoffmann’s Systems Breakthrough

Modern software must adapt to unpredictable environments—changing workloads, evolving user demands, and external disturbances—without sacrificing performance. Hank Hoffmann, Liew Family Chair of Computer Science, together with an international team, introduced a systematic approach for designing reliable adaptive software, drawing on control theory. Their 2015 paper, “Software Engineering Meets Control Theory,” earned Hoffmann the SEAMS Most Influential Paper Award. This award, widely regarded as the equivalent of a Test of Time Award within the software engineering community, recognizes work whose influence and relevance have endured for years beyond its publication.

“This recognition highlights the creativity and persistence of the whole team who contributed to the work. … by bringing together ideas from engineering and computer science we showed how to do it in a principled manner that mitigates many of the risks,” Hoffmann said. The method has proved vital for industries reliant on system performance, such as cloud computing and media services, providing formal ways to guarantee software reliability and responsiveness in real time.

The Significance of Multiple Test of Time Honorees

Multiple Test of Time Awards this year illustrate the department’s devotion to setting standards that stand the test of time. Each award-winning work continues to drive progress across computer science, demonstrating how foundational research from UChicago CS empowers advancements everywhere from tech startups to global science collaborations. The honor serves as a reminder of the value of supporting bold research that benefits society well into the future.