Recently the program committee of ICSME'21 announced the list of papers that received IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Awards at the conference. One of them is "Interactive Patch Filtering as Debugging Aid", which was led by researchers at the Programming Languages Lab. The award recognizes the top 10% of the accepted papers at the conference.

Many automated program repair(APR) techniques take conservative strategies, generating only the patches that are highly likely to be correct, and thus inevitably limiting the recall of APR approaches. However, it is fundamentally difficult to ensure the correctness of the patches because in practice we usually only have a weak specification of the program behavior, usually a test suite. Different from other researches, this paper asks a question: would an APR approach be useful if multiple incorrect patches are generated along with the correct patches? Specifically, in this paper, we propose an interactive patch filtering approach(InPaFer) to help developers identify correct patches for a bug from a group of candidate patches. The results of the user study show that compared with manual debugging, developers with InPaFer and a set of generated patches correctly repaired 62.5% more bugs and used 25.3% less time on average. This result indicates that with proper tool support, the patch review process helps developers understand the bug, and eventually contributes to the debugging process. The reviewers highly recognized this work and gave full marks(accept award quality, accept, accept).