Academic Keynotes and Talks

Coming Soon!    RAISE Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering , 2019, Montreal, Canada
Jane Cleland-Huang, A Drone's-Eye view of Runtime and Design-time AI in Software Intensive Systems.

Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) are increasingly deployed to support activities such as emergency response, commercial deliveries, and agricultural inspections in populated environments. State of the art solutions leverage intelligent, collaborative, and interactive sUAS to provide advanced capabilities. However, when AI is added into the mix, numerous software engineering challenges related to runtime monitoring, testing, and safety assurance are introduced. This keynote discusses several of these open challenges associated with AI-driven CPS. Examples are drawn from runtime and design-time aspects of the Dronology project. A pdf of the slides will be available following the talk.

Requirements Engineering Conference, 2018, Banff, Canada
Jane Cleland-Huang, Disruptive Change in Requirements Engineering

This keynote addressed the challenges and opportunities introduced by disruptive change in the current requirements engineering landscape. Sea changes in the way practitioners develop software, along with advances in artificial intelligence algorithms and the ubiquity of social media environments have created a goldilocks opportunity for innovative creativity that potentially touches every aspect of requirements engineering research. Coupled with passion and vision, these advances revitalize our ability to address open requirements challenges in new and meaningful ways. A pdf of the slides is available here.

Automated Software Engineering Conference, 2018, Montpelier, France
Jane Cleland-Huang, Automated Requirements Engineering Challenges.

Requirements Engineering includes various activities aimed at discovering, analyzing, validating, evolving, and managing software and systems requirements. Many of these activities are human facing, effort intensive, and sometimes error prone. They could benefit greatly from cutting edge advances in automation. However, the software engineering community has primarily focused on automating other aspects of the development process such as testing, code analytics, and mining software respositories. As a result, advances in software analytics have had superficial impact upon advancing the state of art and practice in the field of requirements engineering. Two primary inhibitors are the lack of publicly available datasets and poorly publicized industry-relevant open requirements analytic challenges. To empower the Automated Software Engineering community to tackle open Requirements Engineering challenges, the talk will describe the rapidly evolving landscape of requirements engineering, clearly articulate open challenges, draw upon e xamples from an ongoing, agile, safety-critical project in the domain of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and introduce Dronology as a new community dataset. A pdf of the slides is available here.

Software Product Line Conference, 2017, Seville, Spain
Jane Cleland-Huang, Reverse Engineering Product Lines in Agile Environments.

In order to meet competitive market deadlines and to reduce development costs, families of software systems are increasingly developed as Software Product Lines. Adopting agile practices for product-line development brings the promise of faster time-to-market and less costly delivery, while maintaining or even improving safety. Therefore, agile practices are often adopted even though many product lines, such as medical infusion pumps, pacemakers, and flight-control systems, operate in safety-critical domains. This introduces non-trivial risks related to the safe reuse of components across multiple products. The goal is to dynamically compose demonstrably safe products within the constraints of a fast-moving, incrementally delivered project. This talk described these challenges, with illustrations drawn from Dronology -- a cyber physical environment for managing and coordinating the flight of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) \cite{dronology}. Dronology was designed to support UAV-based search-and-rescue, environmental data collection, fire reconnaissance, commercial product delivery and other such applications. It was initially targeted toward river-rescue scenarios; and is currently being reverse engineered into a product line.. A pdf of the talk is available here.