Over the past decade, the development of Cyber-Physical systems (CPSs) has enabled significant advancements in healthcare, avionics, automotive, railway, and robotics. Notably, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Self-driving Cars (SDCs) have emerged as the frontrunners in avionics and automotive sectors, showcasing autonomous capabilities through onboard cameras and sensors. These systems have opened doors to a range of applications, including crop monitoring, medical and food delivery, and 3D reconstruction of archaeological and space exploration sites. However, the state-of-the-art technology still lacks solutions that can operate in real-life missions due to limited testing solutions, which remains the biggest challenge.

This keynote will discuss the testing and development challenges faced by the COSMOS H2020 Project (https://www.cosmos-devops.org/) in the context of complex CPSs. COSMOS brings together a consortium of four academic and eight industrial partners, with organizations from healthcare, avionics, automotive, utility, and railway sectors. The talk will focus on the studies conducted by COSMOS to identify the types of bugs affecting CPSs and the safety-critical issues of UAVs, along with the selection and prioritization strategies proposed for cost-effective regression testing of SDCs. Additionally, the talk will cover automated testing approaches for UAVs, addressing the issue of the "Reality-gap”.

The keynote will also provide success stories and lessons learned from applying these testing approaches in industrial settings, and outline future directions for generic CPSs and specific use cases such as UAVs and SDCs. Join us for an insightful discussion on the challenges and solutions of testing and developing CPSs in real-life scenarios.

Sebastiano Panichella is a passionate Computer Science Researcher at Zurich University of Applied Science (ZHAW). He is currently working in the ZHAW Institute of Applied Information Technology (InIT).

He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Sannio (Department of Engineering) in 2014 defending the thesis entitled ‘‘Supporting Newcomers in Open Source Software Development Projects’’: doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332519. For more information have a look at his short CV (https://spanichella.github.io/img/CV-short.pdf).

His main research goal is to conduct industrial research, involving both industrial and academic collaborations, to sustain the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, where future “smart cities” will be characterized by millions of smart systems (e.g., cyber-physical systems such as drones, and other autonomous vehicles) connected over the internet, composed by AI-components, and/or controlled by complex embedded software implemented for the cloud. His research interests are in the domain of Software Engineering (SE), cloud computing (CC), and Data Science (DS): DevOps (e.g., Continuous Delivery, Continuous integration), Machine learning applied to SE, Software maintenance and evolution (with particular focus on Cloud, mobile, AI-based, and Cyber-physical applications), Mobile Computing. Moreover, he is promoting DS research on “Summarization Techniques for Code, Changes, and Testing”. He authored or co-authored around eighty papers appeared in International Conferences and Journals. These research works involved studies with industrial and open projects and received best paper awards or best paper nominations:

bit.ly/2SaLWTn

He supervised (or co-supervised) 11 undergrad students, 12 MSc students and currently/recently 9 PhD students (6 of them during the postdoctoral experience at the University of Zurich), and 5 research assistants. He serves and has served as a program committee member of various international conference (e.g., ICSE, ASE, FSE, ICSME, etc.). Dr. Panichella was selected in 2019 as one of the top-20 (second in Switzerland) Most Active Early Stage Researchers Worldwide (results reported by the JSS journal) in SE. Dr. Panichella was selected In 2021 as one of the top-20 Most impactful SE researchers Worldwide (results reported by the JSS journal) He is Editorial Board Member of Journal of Software: evolution and process (JSEP). He is also distinguished reviewer of the TOSEM (Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology) journal. See the blogpost dedicated to the event. His research was funded by one Swiss National Science Foundation Grant in the past.

www.ifi.uzh.ch/en/seal/research/projects/SURF-MobileData.html

Currently, his research is supported by

• the H2020 with the project called COSMOS: DevOps for Complex Cyber-physical Systems, - https://www.cosmos-devops.org/

• the Innosuisse with the project called ARIES: Exploiting User Journeys and Testing Automation for Supporting Efficient Energy Service Platforms - https://www.aries-devops.ch/index.html

1) Recent Achievements of Sebastiano Panichella:

According to the [Results reported by the Journal of Systems and Software]

• Dr. Panichella was selected in 2019 as one of the top-20 (second in Switzerland) Most Active Early Stage Researchers Worldwide in SE.

• Dr. Panichella was selected In 2021 as one of the top-20 Most impactful SE researchers Worldwide (results reported by the JSS journal)

• Dr. Panichella is main PI of the proposal submitted to the H2020 grant`` called COSMOS: DevOps for Complex Cyber-physical Systems was recently selected for funding.

• Dr. Panichella is main PI of the proposal submitted to the Innosuisse `` called ARIES: Exploiting User Journeys and Testing Automation for Supporting Efficient Energy Service Platforms was recently selected for funding.

• The paper [Sebastiano Panichella, Andrea Di Sorbo, Emitza Guzman, Corrado Aaron Visaggio, Gerardo Canfora, Harald C. Gall: How can I improve my app? Classifying user reviews for software maintenance and evolution. ICSME 2015: 281-290], which originated the idea behind his first (SNF) funded project, is one of the most cited papers of ICMSE 2015 (as reported in Google scholar), with more than 400 citations in around 6-7 years.

• The paper ICPC wrote during the bachelor studies of Dr. Panichella-[Giovanni Capobianco, Andrea De Lucia, Rocco Oliveto, Annibale Panichella, Sebastiano Panichella: On the role of the nouns in IR-based traceability recovery. ICPC 2009: 148-157] is among the most influential papers of ICPC in the last decade [period 2009-2019].

2) Research Motto: “It does not make sense to try to be one of the most brilliant scientists. It makes much more sense and it is also more fun to try to be one of the most curious and passionate among them”