I’m Donato Clun, PhD student in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. Currently my research is focused on the automatic characterization of software bugs, to aid the developers during the debug process. ISSTA is certainly one of the most relevant conferences for my research, and in fact I often studied papers that were presented in previous editions. When I noticed the possibility of attending this year’s edition and helping making it happen as a student volunteer I immediately decided to apply, as I knew it was a great opportunity for my career and also a way to provide a service to the research community by helping running the conference.

As a student volunteer I had the the possibility to “live” the conference from the moment I arrived in Amsterdam, spending time with other students working in similar research areas. My goals were to see the latest developments in my field of research, to understand which are the most important challenges that the research community is facing, and possibly to talk about my research with other students and established researchers. Not only I have been able to do all this, but I have also broaden my perspective by discussing with other people working on other areas of research close to mine. There’s no better way to understand the current state of the art than by seeing it presented by their authors and discussing it with them, and a student volunteer I had plenty of occasions to interact with the speakers, and other fellow students.

During my week in Amsterdam I also attended the summer school, which has been another great way to expand my research perspectives around what I’m currently working on. For example the lecture by Lionel Briand on the applications of AI for automated software testing caught my attention, as it was focused on applications on realistic large scale software projects, something that I think is often overlooked.

I have left Amsterdam with many new connections in the academic world, some interesting ideas that I’m going to develop, and in general a far better understanding of the current state of the art and the challenges that the research community is facing in this field.

A big thank you to all the people that made it possible!