“Software adaptation is easy, social adaptation is hard” – that’s not really true, is it? There are many open challenges for effective engineering of adaptive software, and much scope for research in the area. It is not easy. But I’d like to argue in this talk that these challenges are dwarfed by the challenges of engineering adaptive systems - systems that interact with the physical world and the world of people. Let’s call them socio-technical systems. On the one hand, the contextual environment in which adaptive software is developed provides the requirements and constraints within which the software must operate. And yet it can also affect that very context, requiring contextual adaptation to make best use of the software. Where do software engineers’ responsibilities lie? Should they bound and focus their effort only on the development of software and its behaviour, or should their responsibility, and tools, extend into the social and physical world? And more importantly, are software engineers equipped to handle such an expanded role and responsibility. If socio-technical systems are to be truly adaptive, should the software engineer consider, specify, model, and implement physical and social adaptation? As a society, we seem comfortable adapting our physical world to accommodate technology but are much less comfortable dabbling with ’social engineering’. But are we being naive? Social engineering is being attempted all around us, should we just bite the bullet and incorporate it into our software engineering repertoire? This is controversial and hard. Discuss!

Bashar Nuseibeh is Professor of Computing at The Open University (Director of Research 2001-2008). Previously, he a Professor of Software Engineering at Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre (Chief Scientist 2009-2012 & 2017-2023). He was also a Reader (Associate Professor) in Computing at Imperial College London and Head of its Software Engineering Laboratory. He was a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London (2005-2015), and is currently an Honorary Professor at University College London and a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan, and University Collage Dublin (UCD), Ireland.

His current research interests lie at the intersection of requirements engineering, adaptive systems, and security and privacy. He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, of the Automated Software Engineering Journal, and of ACM Transactions on Autonomous & Adaptive Systems. He is Associate Editor if IEEE Security & Privacy and Software Engineering Editor of ACM Books. He chaired the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) and IFIP Working Group 2.9 on Requirements Engineering.

He received an ICSE Most Influential Paper Award, a Philip Leverhulme Prize, an Automated Software Engineering Fellowship, and a Senior Research Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He also received the ACM SigSoft Distinguished Service Award, the IFIP Outstanding Service Award, and RE Lifetime Service Award.

His research work crosses a number of discipline boundaries in computing, and has received best paper/artefact awards in software engineering, logic programming, human-computer interaction, and security & privacy. He received a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award and a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant on Adaptive Security and Privacy.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), the Association of Computer Machinery (FACM), the Institution of Engineering & Technology (FIET), the British Computer Society (FBCS), and the Irish Computer Society( FICS), and is a Member of Academia Europaea (MAE) and the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA).