As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly integral to technological innovation, they also introduce complex forms of technical debt. This keynote explores the multi-faceted concept of technical debt in AI, extending beyond traditional technical issues to encompass the unique challenges of AI systems, such as ethical, legal, and sustainability issues. I will elaborate on the concept of AI socio-technical debt, shedding light on the interconnection between technical aspects of AI systems and broader societal factors, including biases in data, algorithmic transparency, regulatory compliance, and environmental impact. As a key food for thought, the keynote explores reshaping technical debt as a three-dimensional conceptual model composed of technical, socio-technical, and operational facets, providing insights of what the TechDebt research community may offer to level-up the quality of AI-enabled systems.

Fabio Palomba is an Assistant Professor at the Software Engineering (SeSa) Lab of the University of Salerno. He received the European PhD degree in Management & Information Technology in 2017. His PhD Thesis was the recipient of the 2017 IEEE Computer Society Best PhD Thesis Award.

His research interests include software maintenance and evolution, empirical software engineering, source code quality, and mining software repositories: on these topics, he has co-authored over 100 papers in international conferences and journals. He was the recipient of two ACM/SIGSOFT and one IEEE/TCSE Distinguished Paper Awards at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE’13), the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’15), and the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME’17), respectively, and Best Paper Awards at the ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’18) and the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER’18). In 2019 he was the recipient of an SNSF Ambizione grant, one of the most prestigious individual research grants in Europe.

He serves and has served as a program committee member of various international conferences (e.g., IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution), and as referee for various international journals (e.g., IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Springer’s Empirical Software Engineering Journal, Elsevier’s Journal of Systems and Software) in the field of software engineering.

He has been a member of the organizing committee of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension and the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, Program Co-Chair of the 2021 International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2021) and the International Workshop of Machine Learning Techniques for Software Quality Evaluation (MaLTeSQuE 2018 and 2019), and Associate Chair of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2021). Since 2020, he is an Associate Area Editor of the Elsevier’s Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), Editorial Assistant of the Elsevier’s Science of Computer Programming (SCP), and Review Board Member of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE). Since 2016, he is Review Board Member of Springer’s Empirical Software Engineering Journal. From 2019 to 2022, he has been Social Media Editor for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM). For his reviewing activities, he was the recipient of 12 Distinguished/Outstanding Reviewer Awards.