PhD Candidate Bogdan Stoica Receives Distinguished Artifact Evaluator Award for Championing Reproducibility in Computer Science

The University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science is proud to share that Bogdan Alexandru Stoica, a soon-to-graduate PhD candidate advised by Professor Shan Lu, is a recipient of the Distinguished Artifact Evaluator (DAE) award at Eurosys 2025.

The DAE award recognizes exceptional dedication to artifact evaluation, a new but rapidly expanding process that started six years ago to address the reusability and reproducibility of software tools that support research papers and are published alongside them. Artifact review was founded to integrate into the peer review process of top conferences in CS. The reviewing committee would install the software tools used in the research process of a paper and rerun the software to recreate every table, graph, and number, verifying that the results aligned with those presented by the authors. The CS community was increasingly faced with issues of reproducibility and reusability of research prototypes, because oftentimes results from papers cannot be recreated.

Stoica, who entered the PhD program after working as a software engineer for Microsoft and Bitdefender Labs, was motivated to join academia because he was interested in finding and eliminating software bugs and improving code inefficiencies – something that industry engineers often lacked the time to pursue in depth. It was in the process of doing his research that Stoica became involved in artifact review and evaluation.

“I was presenting results to my collaborators, and they wanted to rerun something that I did three months ago,” Stoica recalled. “I simply could not run my own code, and I got frustrated. I realized I had to be more deliberate and systematic in documenting my steps. One of my collaborators suggested that I volunteer for an artifact review committee to see how other researchers are addressing this problem. I’ve been doing this for six years now.”

Since getting involved, Stoica has not just reviewed countless papers but also worked tirelessly to improve infrastructure support for other reviewers, such as onboarding people onto cloud platforms that aid with artifact evaluation, like Chameleon Cloud, a collaboration between UChicago and Argonne National Labs. These kinds of efforts typically fall to the AEC Chair; however, because the evaluation process is growing, Stoica contributed significantly to testing infrastructure and improving the efficiency of the evaluation process. Since he joined, the number of committee members has expanded from 20-30 people to over a hundred, demonstrating the rapid growth of artifact evaluation as an integral part of the peer review process and its importance in improving the reproducibility of research.

Stoica emphasizes that the committee never assumes bad faith. Even if the committee’s results don’t match the paper, authors are assumed to be overworked and have lost track of the correct version of the code, rather than having falsified their results. Each person on the committee evaluates 4 to 5 papers on a completely voluntary basis, and they produce a review and send it back to the authors. After the review process, the paper gets a badge of honor that demonstrates its efforts in collaborating with the evaluation committee to ensure accurate and reproducible results.

“The DAE award is an indication that my efforts weren’t in vain and that we are doing something useful and helpful to the larger CS community,” Stoica said. “Not just in the pace that the artifact evaluation committee has been expanding, but also in the number of authors that are proactively seeking evaluation of their prototypes. This is something that is encouraging and makes me happy, because every year, it’s a month-long effort to do the reviews and prepare for each conference. Sometimes, I had to do three conferences a year.”

After graduating, Stoica is moving forward as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He will be doing both research and teaching and will continue to stay involved with the artifact evaluation committee. He has been invited to serve as the co-chair of the Artifact Evaluation Committee at EuroSys 2026, a position that he is excited to take on.

To learn more about Stoica and his work, please visit his website here.