The need for sustainability is crucial for all aspects of society, as framed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, and increasingly prioritized by Governments and Global Organizations. Thanks to digital transformation, most organizations in all sectors are facing incredible challenges to embrace sustainability as related to their software portfolios. Similarly, they struggle in identifying the opportunities that software sustainability can bring. This talk introduces the role of software for sustainability and related research, with special emphasis on software architecture (and architecture design decision making) in our highly digitalized society. Given the pervasive presence of software-intensive systems that are multi-stakeholder and that bring incredible complexities, understanding and managing software architecture design decision making has never been as important as it is nowadays. Examples from collaboration with various industries, sectors, and societal groups are used to illustrate the main takeaways.

About speaker: Patricia Lago is a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she leads the Software and Sustainability (S2) research group in the Computer Science Department. Her passion in research is to create software engineering knowledge that makes software better, smarter, and more sustainable. Her research focuses on software architecture, software quality assessment, and software sustainability.

She is the initiator of the VU Computer Science Master Track in Software Engineering and Green IT, the director of the Master Information Sciences, and a co-founder of the Green Lab, a place where researchers, students, and companies collaborate to measure the energy footprint of software solutions and the impact on software quality. She has a PhD in Control and Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino and a Master in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, both in Italy. She has been awarded an honorary doctorate degree by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

She is program committee member and reviewer of the major international conferences and journals in her fields of interest; a member of the Steering Committees of IEEE ICSA, ECSA; and currently the Steering Committee Chair of the ICT4S conference series. She is also in the management team of IPN (ICT-research Platform Netherlands). She has published over 200 articles in all major scientific conferences and journals of her field. She is a senior member of ACM and IEEE. More info at: www.patricialago.nl.

Patricia Lago is a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she leads the Software and Sustainability (S2) research group in the Computer Science Department. She has a PhD in Control and Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino and a Master in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, both in Italy. She is a member of the IEEE ICSA and ECSA Steering Committees, and the Steering Committee Chair of the ICT4S conference series. She has published in all major conferences and journals in her field.

Her passion in research is to create software engineering knowledge that makes software better, smarter, and more sustainable. Her philosophy is that research should be industrial-relevant and serve the final purpose of being applied in practice. To this end, her research specifically focuses on the “real’’ needs of practice by establishing collaboration with partners from both the private and public sectors.

Her research and teaching are about software architecture, sustainability, software design and modeling, software quality assessment. She is the initiator of the Computer Science Master Track in Software Engineering and Green IT, and the director of the Master Information Sciences. She co-founded the Green Lab, a place where researchers, students, and companies collaborate to measure the energy footprint of software solutions.