This keynote introduces the use of Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) to tackle some of the most pressing ethical requirements posed by modern software systems. For example, in automated decision-making software systems and social systems, fairness and safety properties become prominent concerns, whereas the dramatic increase in CO2 emission due to the use of Artificial Intelligence generates growing concerns for software sustainability.

While the main requirement for more traditional software systems is to provide the user with the right functionalities (i.e., implement the functional requirements correctly), realising modern and more complex software systems involves ensuring that a software is designed, implemented, and deployed in a way that considers the impact it has on users, society, and the environment. This calls for more comprehensive engineering practices for developing software systems with a focus on ethical, social, and environmental considerations, dubbed as responsible software engineering. However, realising this type of systems often involves finding the best or most effective solution among a vast number of possible alternatives and one cannot expect for a software engineer, even the most expert, to be able to manually find all possible opportunities. On the other hand, SBSE provides a framework to systematically explore and evaluate these alternatives, allowing engineers to identify optimal or near-optimal solutions.

In this keynote, I will show how SBSE can be a flexible and powerful mean to produce multiple variants of a software system empowering decision-makers to make informed choices that balance conflicting objectives and that align with their goals and priorities. I will present some recent results from my group and others on the use of SBSE for responsible software engineering and discuss directions for future work towards realising more responsible software systems.

Federica Sarro is a Full Professor of Software engineering at the Department of Computer Science, University College London.

She leads the SOLAR (Software Optimisation, Learning and Analytics Research) research group https://solar.cs.ucl.ac.uk.