[AISWorld] Winner of the 2019 Peter P. Chen Award

[Woo, Carson]

On behalf of the ER Steering Committee, we are pleased to announce the winner of the 2019 Peter P. Chen Award: Professor Eric Yu, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada.

Initiated by Elsevier in 2008, the Peter P. Chen Award honors one person each year for his or her outstanding contributions to the field of conceptual modeling.  The winner will receive a plaque and a prize of $2,500 sponsored by Elsevier Publishing Company, and be invited to give a keynote speech at either the ER'2019 conference (Salvador, Brazil, http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/er2019/) or ER'2020 conference (Vienna, Austria).

The committee reviewed the qualifications of the nominees with regard to their contributions to advancing the field of conceptual modeling in (1) research, (2) education, (3) practice, and (4) service for the scientific community, as well as their international reputation. The decision was unanimous in favor of Professor Yu based on his "outstanding scientific contributions and extensive professional services in the areas of conceptual modeling and requirements engineering".

Professor Eric Yu is very well known for his contribution to intentional modeling in the conceptual modeling and requirements engineering communities, particularly with the i* framework. His Requirements Engineering (RE'97) paper, introducing i*, won the most influential paper at RE'07, and has over 1,700 citations according to Google Scholar. Since his PhD thesis in 1995, Professor Yu and his colleagues, including many master's, PhD, and postdoctorate students, have produced a number of i* refinements, extensions, and applications to a wide variety of domains.  The i* framework now has hundreds of related research papers, tools, project, and industrial applications. Professor Yu has over 17,000 citations and a h-index of 57 (according to Google Scholar). Material on the i* Framework has been incorporated into many conceptual modeling and requirements course throughout the world, including Brazil, UK, Italy, and Sweden. Within the ER community, he has published 11 articles in the ER Conference between 1994 and 2016. He founded and co-organized the RiGIM workshop series (now MREBA) in the ER Conference and has served as the program co-Chair for ER'2008. In addition, Professor Yu has been a co-investigator for several industrial projects, including SAP, IBM, Bell Canada, Google, ScotiaBank, and Siemens (USA).

The 2019 selection committee consisted of Carson C. Woo (Canada), Isabell Comyn-Wattiau (France), Heinrich C. Mayr (Austria), Veda C. Storey (USA), and Yair Wand (Canada). We extend our congratulations and best wishes to Professor Yu and his family.

Previous winners of the Peter P. Chen Award:

2018 Veda C. Storey, Georgia State University, USA
2017 Yair Wand, University of British Columbia, Canada
2016 Oscar Pastor, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
2015 Il-Yeol Song, Drexel University, USA
2014 Antonio L. Furtado, Pontificia Univ. Catolica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2013 Carlo Batini, Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
2012 Stefano Spaccapietra, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne,  Switzerland
2011 Tok Wang Ling, National University of Singapore, Singapore
2010 John Mylopoulos, University of Trento, Italy
2009 David Embley, Brigham Young University, USA
2008 Bernhard Thalheim, University of Kiel, Germany