ICSE 2026
Sun 12 - Sat 18 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Foundation models (FMs) are among humanity’s most complex software systems. They are currently engineered through tribal knowledge and ad‑hoc processes, despite quarterly release cadences and rapidly expanding model size, context length, and modality. This 90‑minute technical briefing presents SE4FM—a disciplined software engineering framing for FMs—organized around four pillars: DataOps (deciding, curating, optimizing, and governing data), ExperimentOps (hypothesis‑driven, scaling‑law‑aware experimentation from small to large; including RLHF/RLAIF/RLVR pipelines), EvalOps (systematic testing, prioritization, and debugging), and FieldOps (releases, monitoring, and compliance). The goal is to give software engineering researchers a unique, insider view of how FMs are really built and run at scale, and to surface concrete SE challenges and opportunities where new SE-centric methods, tools, and theory are urgently needed.