Speakers, Bios & Abstracts

Abstract

This talk addresses the question: "How can we use Large Language Models for reliable Software Engineering when the models are inherently non-deterministic and worse, may hallucinate, thereby leading to more, not fewer bugs?

We outline the approach known as "Assured Large Language Model Software Engineering" (Assured LLMSE), which addresses the twin challenges of:

1. Ensuring LLM-generated code does not regress the properties of the original code.

2. Quantifying the improvements achieved in a verifiable and measurable way.

In so doing, the Assured LLMSE approach tackles the problem of LLMs' tendency to hallucinate, as well as providing confidence that generated code improves on the existing code base. Using Assured LLMSE, not only avoids problems of non-determinism and hallucination, but can even generate code that is superior-by-design to human-authored code, in well-defined ways. The keynote will outline the overall approach to Assured LLMSE, and will present results from its application at Meta platforms in the development of large systems of tens to hundreds of millions of lines of code.

This is joint work with Nadia Alshahwan, Andrea Aquino, Jubin Chheda, Anastasia Finegenova, Inna Harper, Mitya Lyubarskiy, Neil Maiden, Alexander Mols, Shubho Sengupta, Alexandru Marginean, and Eddy Wang.

Mark Harman is a full-time Research Scientist at Meta Platforms in the Instagram Product Performance team, working on software engineering automation. He was previously in the Simulation-Based Testing (SBT) team at Meta, which he co-founded. The SBT team developed and deployed both the Sapienz and WW platforms for client- and server- side testing. Sapienz grew out of Majicke (a start up Mark co-founded) that was acquired by Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2017. Prior to working at Meta Platforms, Mark was head of Software Engineering at UCL and director of its CREST centre, where he remains a part time professor. In his more purely scientific work, he co-founded the field Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) in 2001. He received the IEEE Harlan Mills Award and the ACM Outstanding Research Award in 2019 for his work on Software Engineering automation, and was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2020.

Abstract

Information will follow soon.

Dorothea Wagner is a German computer scientist, known for her research in graph drawing, route planning, and social network analysis. She heads the Institute of Theoretical Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Wagner did her undergraduate studies at RWTH Aachen University, graduating in 1983, and then continued at RWTH Aachen for her graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1986 under the supervision of Rolf Möhring and Walter Oberschelp. She then earned her habilitation at the Berlin Institute of Technology in 1992. She stayed at the Berlin Institute of Technology as an assistant professor, also taking a temporary position at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1993, before becoming a full professor at the University of Konstanz in 1994. In 2003, she moved to Karlsruhe.

From 2007 to 2014 she was vice president of the German Research Foundation (DFG), 2015 to 2023 member of the German Council for Science and Humanities and 2020 to 2023 chair of the council. She is editor-in-chief of the OpenAccess Series in Informatics book series published by Schloss Dagstuhl and has been on the editorial boards and program committees of many more computer science journals and conferences. She coordinated several national and international research programs. In 2019 she received the Konrad Zuse medal for her achievements in computer science. She is a member of Academia Europaea, acatech - National Academy of Science and Engineering Germany and Heidelberg Academy of Science, and holds a honorary doctorate degree from TU Dortmund.

Short Bio

Carlo Ghezzi is an ACM Fellow (1999), an IEEE Fellow (2005), a member of the European Academy of Sciences and of the Italian Academy of Sciences. He received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2015) and the Distinguished Service Award (2006). He has been President of Informatics Europe. He has been a member of the program committee of flagship conferences in the software engineering field, such as the ICSE and ESEC/FSE, for which he also served as Program and General Chair. He has been the Editor in Chief of the ACM Trans. on Software Engineering and Methodology and an associate editor of and IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, Communications of the ACM and Science of Computer Programming, and Computing. Ghezzi’s research has been mostly focusing on different aspects of software engineering. He co-authored over 200 papers and 8 books. He coordinated several national and international research projects. He has been the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant.

Short Bio

Lynda Hardman is Manager Research & Strategy at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI, https://www.cwi.nl), the Dutch national research centre for Mathematics and Computer Science. She is full professor, part-time, of Multimedia Discourse Interaction at Utrecht University. Her research interests are in how visualisations can be used to improve the way domain experts interpret and interact with (linked) data.
Prof. Hardman is the director of Amsterdam Data Science (http://amsterdamdatascience.nl), a partner organization whose mission is to strengthen the Data Science and AI ecosystem that spans academia, industry and society in the Amsterdam region. She is the European director of LIAMA (http://liama.ia.ac.cn), a research collaboration since 1997 between INRIA (France), CWI and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
She was the president of Informatics Europe 2016-2017. During her time as board member, she co-founded the IE working group Women in Informatics Research and Education around 2012.
She was named ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014 and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Short Bio

Enrico Nardelli is a full professor of Informatics in the University of Roma "Tor Vergata", affiliated with the Department of Mathematics. Since April 2014 he is coordinating the project “Programma il Futuro“ for the introduction of basic concepts of informatics as a scientific subject in Italian schools, with emphasis on primary schools and on computational thinking. Programma il Futuro is a joint project bewteen the Italian Ministry of Education and CINI, the Italian national inter-university Consortium for Informatics. Since its inception, the project has led about three million Italian students (half of them in primary schools) to start learning the principle of informatics. He was the President of Informatics Europe from 2018-2023, the association of informatics departments and research laboratories in Europe and neighbouring areas and initiator of the Informatics for All Coalition.

The Faculty of Science at the University of Helsinki stands as a leading hub of natural sciences and technology in the Nordic Countries. This talk will explore how structured departmental collaborations and cross-faculty initiatives have driven significant advancements in research and education. By highlighting key interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary endeavors, such as data science, quantum technologies, sustainability, and atmospheric and environmental sciences, the presentation will showcase exemplary case studies. The talk will provide insights into the lessons learned from these initiatives and offer strategies for managing large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations within the university environment.

Sasu Tarkoma is Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Helsinki and Professor of Computer Science. He has published over 350 scientific articles. He has authored or co-authored four international scientific books published by Wiley, CRC Press, and Cambridge University Press. He has 12 granted US patents and over 20 international patent applications. His research has received a number of Best Paper awards and mentions, for example at ACM SenSys (Test of Time Award), IEEE PerCom, ACM CCR, and ACM OSR.

It is a challenge to determine whether ICT graduates meet the expectations of employers. Estonia found an innovative solution by asking employers to contribute to shaping education. The IT Academy is a cooperation programme of the Estonian state, universities, vocational schools and information and communication technology (ICT) companies designed to raise the quality of ICT-related education, develop research in the field and ensure the necessary labour resources. Results are excellent, as every ninth student in Estonia chooses to study ICT at the bachelor and applied higher education level. Moreover, the share of those who choose ICT at the master level has grown even faster in the last 10 years: every seventh student who enters master studies chooses to study ICT.

Gert Jervan is a Dean at the School of Information Technologies at TalTech and a professor of dependable computer systems. He has been a coordinator of several national and international research projects. During recent years he has been heavily involved with the EC Smart Anything Everywhere initiative projects that are providing cascade funding for various tech transfer projects.

In this presentation, Alessandro Bozzon will share his experience and lesson learned as the head of the Sustainable Desing Engineering department at the Delft University of Technology. SDE aims at contributing to societal transitions through technology-driven interventions grounded in engineering and design research techniques. The research mission of SDE department is to develop theories and methods for the design of **sustainable** products, services, and systems that have a positive impact on people, society, and the planet. The research approach builds on strong prototyping competence, supported by analytical and computational modelling techniques, and validated through rich quantitative and qualitative evaluation approaches. The department operates in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, and hosts scientists and educators with a very mixed background: from design to computer science, from history to material science, from biology to mechanical engineering. Such diversity in methodologies and competences provides great opportunity for impactful work, but also raises several challenges for research and education coordination and strategic planning. The presentation will describe examples of such challenges and opportunities, and will provide a platform for further discussions on the opportunities and challenges of sustainability and multidisciplinarity in research and in education.

Alessandro Bozzon is Professor of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, co-leading the Knowledge and Intelligence Design (KInD) group, Department of Sustainable Design Engineering, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE); and part-time professor with the Department of Software Technology of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science (EEMCS) of Delft University of Technology. As of November 2020, he serves as head of the Department of Sustainable Design Engineering. He is co-director of the Future Libraries Lab, a collaboration with the Royal Library of The Netherlands.

Alessandro Bozzon is also Principal Investigator in Urban Data and Intelligence at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions. He is an active member of the Delft Data Science initiative, where he is actively involved in activities pertaining to the Social Data Science work line; and of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus BOLD (Big, Open and Linked Data) Cities initiative.

Short Bio

Jean-Marc Jezequel received an engineering degree in Telecommunications from Telecom Bretagne in 1986, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Rennes, France, in 1989. He then worked for the TRANSPAC company on an Intelligent Network project, and became a researcher in the Irisa Lab for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). During the most of 1996, he has been visiting Pr. Yonezawa's lab., in the University of Tokyo, Japan.
Since October 2000, Jean-Marc a Professor at the University of Rennes. From 2001 to 2011, he was head of Inria's Triskell team.
From January 2012 to December 2020, he has been Director of IRISA.
In 2016, Jean-Marc was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal. In 2020, he was awarded the ACM/IEEE MODELS 2020 Career Award. In 2022, he has been a Visiting Professor at University McGill, Montreal, Canada. Since Sept. 2023, he has been appointed as a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
Since January 2024, Jean-Marc is the President of Informatics Europe (he was Vice President from 2021 to 2023).

Abstract

Digital technologies have become an increasingly important part of people's lives. Despite the pervasive presence of mobile phones, applications, and online services, many people struggle with the digital world. These include older people, people with disabilities, and others who find themselves unable to access these technologies for reasons such as language barriers or situational impairments. Designing and developing better, more inclusive online content and services would seem an obvious response. However, many software developers are unaware of inclusive design practices such as co-design, and standards and guidelines like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that address these issues.

The aim of the Inclusion4EU project is to co-create a framework, guidelines, and checklists for inclusive software design and development with co-design teams formed of academics with expertise in inclusive design, software designers and developers, and persons from excluded categories, including older adults and persons with physical and cognitive disabilities. The framework will be translated into new curricula, best practices, and learning resources that can be used by Informatics educators to enhance their teaching methods and materials.

Short Bio

Dympna O'Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer and Assistant Head of School at the School of Computer Science at Technical University Dublin City Campus. Her research is in Applied Social Computing with a focus on Health Informatics and Digital Ethics.
In the area of Health Informatics, she is interested in the design, development and evaluation of Decision Support Systems to support clinician and patient decision making. This work involves research across many aspects of the domain including electronic and personal health records, machine learning and intelligent algorithms, explainable AI, sensors and smart home technologies, accessible user interfaces and theories of health behaviour change.
In terms of Digital Ethics, her work is focused on studying the societal impacts of various technologies and includes topics such as data ethics , data management, artificial intelligence, pervasive computing, social media platforms as well as relevant governance and legislation.

She is currently am PI of two large research projects. The first is an SFI Frontiers for the Future project titled Enabling Self-Care and Shared Decision Making for People Living with Dementia. The project is being undertaken in collaboration with Netwell Casala at DkIT and the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and is focused on the development of a new intelligent computer-based toolkit that will help and support people affected by dementia and in their daily living. Using a co-design approach, the toolkit will support self-management, empower participation in shared decision-making with relatives and carers and help people with dementia remain healthy and independent in their homes for longer.

Secondly, she leads a transnational Erasmus+ project titled Ethics4EU. Project partners include Telecom SudParis, Mälardalen University Sweden, the European Digital Learning Network and Informatics Europe. The Ethics4EU project is developing new curricula, best practices and learning resources for teaching Digital Ethics to computer science students. It follows a ‘train the trainer’ model for up-skilling computer science lecturers across Europe.

Abstract

The underrepresentation of women in Informatics presents a critical challenge to academia and industry. Women are underrepresented at all academic levels (17.1% at BSc, 22.1% at MSc, and 20.5% at PhD level – according to Informatics Europe Higher Education Data Portal). This gender gap limits the diversity of perspectives in software creation and in educating the next generation in Informatics.

EUGAIN project main objective is to improve gender balance in Informatics through the creation and strengthening of a truly multi-cultural European network of academics working on the forefront of the efforts in their countries, institutions and research communities. As we reach the end of the project, we want to share the main outcomes of the project and present the concrete instruments that can be smoothly adopted by all interested stakeholders.

Simona Motogna is a professor of Computer Science at Babes Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca, Romania, and currently serves as the chair of the Diversity and Inclusion working group of Informatics Europe. Her research focuses on empirical methods in Software Engineering and Software Quality. Simona was also an active member in EUGAIN COST Action and dedicated to supporting women in academic careers in Computer Science.

Antinisca Di Marco is Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of L’Aquila. Her main research topics are Software Quality Engineering, Data Science, Quality in Learning Systems, and Bioinformatics. She is involved in several national and international projects on such topics. She is responsible for the research infrastructure of the Territori Aperti project, co-PI of the SoBigData.it project, and the director of the INFOLIFE CINI Laboratory node in L’Aquila. Since 2018, she has been involved in several actions and projects to improve equal opportunities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). In particular, she is a member of the cost action EUGAIN, co-creator, and co-coordinator of PinKamP.

Dr Brian Keegan is Head of Computer Science at TU Dublin School of Computer Science and a Founding member of ASCNet. Brian supervises PhD students whose research includes networking, cybersecurity, algorithm design, and Machine Learning. Further research includes IoT, Smart Spaces, Optimal Energy Systems and Communications Engineering. Brian is a Senior Member of IEEE and works with the EU Commision on HORIZON evaluation. Brian has a background in Electrical and Electronic Engineering with a PhD specialisation in Wireless Networks completed in 2010 at DIT. Brian also holds an M.Phil. and B.Eng. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering as well as a Pg.Dip in Third Level Teaching and Learning. Brian has worked for Oracle (Sun Microsystems) as software engineer and release lead as well as working for Cisco Systems, San Jose as software developer and test engineer. Brian has been involved with academic teaching since 1998 and is currently a Senior Lecturer with TU Dublin Computer Science.

Abstract

Data centers energy demand is increasing. While a great deal of effort has been made to reduce the amount of CO2 generated by large cloud providers, too little has been done from the application perspective. We claim that application developers can impact the environmental footprint by enhancing the application design with additional features. Following the proposed Sustainable Application Design Process (SADP), the application design is enriched with information that can be leveraged by cloud providers to manage application execution in an energy-aware manner.

SADP aims to emphasize the awareness on the sustainability of applications by proposing a methodology for its evaluation.

To this end, we first suggest possible actions to enrich the application design towards sustainability, and finally describe how this additional information can be leveraged in the application workflow.

Short Bio

Monica Vitali is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. She earned her PhD in Information Technology from the same institution in 2014, focusing on reducing energy consumption in data centers and cloud environments. Her research interests include adaptive information systems management, with an emphasis on sustainability and environmental considerations. Recently, she has been developing methods for designing applications that automatically adjust their behavior to minimize environmental impact. Additionally, she is exploring strategies to reduce the environmental footprint of machine learning from a data-centric perspective. Dr. Vitali has participated in several European research projects and currently leads a unit in the Italian government-funded FREEDA project, which focuses on energy-aware cloud-native deployment in heterogeneous cloud-edge infrastructures.

Abstract

The operation and development of software systems significantly contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it is crucial to measure and understand the impact of engineering decisions on software systems' energy efficiency. While it is feasible to measure energy consumption for individual machines and in controlled lab environments, this becomes challenging in larger distributed settings that utilize modern cloud infrastructure and services.

In response to this challenge, we propose an experimental methodology tailored for cloud-native environments. We employ this methodology to study the effects of common microservice design patterns on energy efficiency. Our study reveals existing gaps in current research, highlighting areas that need further investigation by the broader ICT community.

Sebastian Werner is an accomplished researcher working at ISE, TU Berlin, Germany. He is currently a workpackage leader in a Horizon Europe project and active in teaching. His primary expertise lies in serverless technology and the design of distributed cloud-based applications and platforms, which he also earned his PhD for in 2023. His current research focuses the software engeneering of quality-driven distributed systems, specificly on sustainability and trustworthiness. Sebastian is passionate about addressing these challenges of the next generation of cloud-computing both in his research and his teaching.