Review Committee
The individuals who evaluate our nominees.
ICSTE's Review Committee operates independently of the Board of Directors. Members are practitioners, researchers, and technologists appointed for their domain expertise and their commitment to rigorous, impartial evaluation.
Committee members are appointed by the Board following a nomination process open to existing committee members and institutional partners. Appointments are for three-year renewable terms. Members are required to declare any relationship — professional, financial, or personal — with nominees prior to evaluation, and to recuse themselves from any decision where a conflict exists. The committee currently has fourteen members across nine countries; the profiles below represent the full committee as constituted for the 2026 award cycle.
Prof. Alastair Drummond
Chair, Review Committee
Chair of Software Engineering, University of Edinburgh
2021 – present
Professor Drummond has spent 30 years in software engineering research, with a particular focus on formal verification, type theory, and the design of safe concurrent systems. He has served on the programme committees of POPL, ICSE, and PLDI, and has authored two widely used textbooks on systems programming. He chairs the ICSTE Review Committee and was one of its founding members.
Dr. Nkechi Osei
Committee Member
Associate Professor of Distributed Systems, TU Berlin
2022 – present
Dr. Osei's research focuses on the consistency and fault-tolerance properties of distributed databases and consensus protocols. Prior to academia, she spent six years at a Berlin-based cloud infrastructure firm where she led the design of their multi-region replication layer. She brings particular expertise to nominations in the infrastructure and reliability engineering categories.
Soren Magnusson
Committee Member
Founder, three enterprise software companies (Stockholm)
2021 – present
Soren Magnusson has founded and scaled three B2B software companies across the Nordic market, with exits to two international technology groups. He evaluates nominations with a focus on commercial applicability, product architecture, and the practical challenges of building software at scale in real organisations. He is a co-founder of ICSTE.
Dr. Yemi Adeyemi
Committee Member
Research Lead, Lagos-Oxford Centre for Computing
2021 – present
Dr. Adeyemi leads a research programme at the intersection of machine learning, data infrastructure, and public-sector technology. His work has been funded by the Gates Foundation and the Royal Society, and he has advised governments in four African countries on digital infrastructure strategy. He ensures the committee's evaluations are informed by a global rather than Euro-centric perspective.
Dr. Helena Varga
Committee Observer
Former Director of Technology Policy, European Commission
2021 – present
Dr. Varga served for eleven years at the European Commission, latterly as Director of Technology Policy. She was responsible for early drafts of what became the EU AI Act and has deep expertise in the regulatory and governance dimensions of technology. At ICSTE, she serves as an observer member, contributing primarily to the governance and public policy dimensions of nominations.
Marcus Held
Committee Member
Principal Engineer, formerly Google DeepMind
2023 – present
Marcus Held spent twelve years at Google and DeepMind, working on distributed training infrastructure and evaluation frameworks for large-scale machine learning systems. He left in 2023 to advise a small number of AI startups. His primary domain of evaluation for ICSTE is applied machine learning, MLOps, and research-to-production pipelines.
Dr. Ingrid Lund
Committee Member
Independent Security Researcher; former CTO, Nordic Banking Consortium
2023 – present
Dr. Lund has spent her career at the intersection of cryptography, systems security, and financial infrastructure. She spent a decade as CTO of the Nordic Banking Consortium before returning to independent research. Her assessments focus on the correctness, security, and adversarial robustness of nominees' technical contributions.
Prof. Ji-ho Park
Committee Member
KAIST School of Computing, Seoul
2024 – present
Professor Park's research covers programming language design, compiler optimisation, and runtime systems. He has co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed papers and holds four patents in compiler technology. He joined the ICSTE committee to strengthen its evaluation capacity for nominations in languages, compilers, and developer tooling.
Conflicts of Interest Policy
All committee members complete a conflict-of-interest declaration at the start of each award cycle and again upon receipt of the final nominee shortlist. A conflict is defined as any prior professional collaboration, institutional affiliation, investment relationship, or personal relationship that could reasonably be seen to influence an evaluation.
Members who declare a conflict for a given nominee are excluded from all deliberations concerning that individual and do not have access to other committee members' evaluations of that nominee. A quorum of at least five non-conflicted members is required for any award to be granted. Conflict declarations are reviewed annually by the Board and are available on request to institutional partners.