Keynotes

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Title: Governing Software and Algorithms as Institutions

Abstract: Digital technologies increasingly shape how we work, communicate, and make decisions, and understanding them requires perspectives that go beyond computation alone. Software systems — from social networks to large-scale online platforms — operate not merely as technical infrastructures but as sociotechnical institutions that organize behavior, attention, and interaction. In this keynote, I argue that engineers and data scientists no longer hold purely technical roles: they are designers of collective action, influencing how communities coordinate, deliberate, and act. Viewing software and algorithms as institutions offers a powerful framework for understanding these responsibilities. I will explore how institutional theory can illuminate the implicit rules, incentives, and governance mechanisms embedded in digital systems, and how this perspective can guide the development of new governance frameworks for trustworthy, accountable, and human-centered software.

Bio: Virgilio Almeida is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University, a master’s degree in Computer Science from PUC-Rio, and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from UFMG.

He has held visiting positions at several universities and research laboratories, including Harvard University (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), New York University, Boston University, the Santa Fe Institute, and HP Labs. Professor Almeida is the co-author of five books on web technologies, e-commerce, performance modeling, and capacity planning, published by Prentice Hall. His most recent books are Governance for the Digital World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Algorithmic Institutionalisms: The Changing Rules of Social and Political Life (Oxford University Press, 2023).

He is a recipient of the 2025 UNESCO-Uzbekistan Beruniy Prize for Scientific Research on Ethics of AI and of Brazil's Grand Cross of the National Order of Scientific Merit, the country's highest official distinction for scientific achievement. Virgílio has served as National Secretary for Information Technology Policies at the Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation. Virgilio is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC), the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). His current research interests include social computing, algorithm governance, and the modeling and analysis of large-scale distributed systems.

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Title:Towards an Awesome AI-driven Future for Software Engineering

Abstract: Artificial intelligence, and especially Generative AI, are fundamentally changing the nature of software engineering in that engineers increasingly transition from building systems to supervising the building of systems. These systems also are increasingly dynamic at run-time through techniques like reinforcement learning and runtime (re-)generation of code requiring us to increasingly focus on “building the machine that builds the machine”. One consequence of this development is that software will become much cheaper which, following Jovan’s Paradox, will likely result in a much higher demand for software. For the software engineering community, the challenge becomes how we address the challenges created by these trends while maintaining regulatory compliance in the many industries that require this. The keynote describes these trends in more detail, shares experiences from the companies in Software Center (www.software-center.se) and discusses the implications for industry and research.

Bio: Jan Bosch is professor at Chalmers University Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden and director of the Software Center (www.software-center.se), a strategic partner-funded collaboration between more than 15 large European companies (including Ericsson, Volvo Cars, Volvo Trucks, Saab Defense, Scania, Siemens and Bosch) and five universities focused on digitalization. Earlier, he worked as Vice President Engineering Process at Intuit Inc where he also led Intuit's Open Innovation efforts and headed the central mobile technologies team. Before Intuit, he was vice president and head of the Software and Application Technologies Laboratory at Nokia Research Center, Finland. Prior to joining Nokia, he headed the software engineering research group at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He received a MSc degree from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree from Lund University, Sweden.

His research activities include digitalisation, evidence-based development, business ecosystems, artificial intelligence and machine/deep learning, software architecture, software product families and software variability management. He is the author of several books including "Design and Use of Software Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach" published by Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley & ACM Press) and ÒSpeed, Data and Ecosystems: Excelling in a Software-Driven WorldÓ published by Taylor and Francis, editor of several books and volumes and author of hundreds of research articles. He is editor for Journal of Systems and Software as well as Science of Computer Programming, chaired several conferences as general and program chair, served on numerous program committees and organised countless workshops. Jan is a fellow member of the International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA) and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science.

Jan serves on the boards of Burt Intelligence and Shelfplanner. Earlier he served on the boards of IVER, Peltarion and Strawberry Planet and was chairman of the boards of Auqtus, Fidesmo and Remente. In the startup space, Jan is an angel investor in several startup companies. He also runs a boutique consulting firm, Boschonian AB, that offers its clients support around the implications of digitalization including the management of R&D and innovation. For more information see his website: www.janbosch.com.

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Title: AI Engineering: From Software-Centric Systems to AIware-Centric Systems

Abstract: Software engineering has historically assumed that business logic lives in human-written code. We specify behaviour, implement algorithms, and verify correctness using tests and analysis over that code. Foundation models and agentic systems are breaking this contract in two distinct ways. First, AI can now write, improve, and test large volumes of software code with increasing autonomy, turning implementation and low-level verification into cheap, automated activities. Second, and more profoundly, much of the business logic no longer appears in code at all. It migrates into model weights and learned policies, with general-purpose models that can act as new software components, adapt to new tasks through in-context learning, and even generate bespoke tools for end-users without direct developer involvement.

This keynote frames AI engineering around these two emerging paradigms: AI that writes the code, and AIware where the logic is largely in the weights. In both cases, the core bottleneck is no longer producing behaviour but verifying it. Automated verification works remarkably well when tasks can be made intrinsically verifiable. AI can then generate tests, search the program space, and iterate until the behaviour passes stringent checks. However, when tasks are hard to verify, or when problems are not decomposed into verifiable sub-tasks, the system simply learns to “pass the tests” while still failing in the real world. Human verification becomes a scarce resource, and misallocating what is given to AI versus what is reserved for humans undermines trustworthiness at scale.

I will argue that AIware engineering must become verifiability-first. Software engineers and AI engineers will increasingly be responsible for decomposing problems so that machine-generated behaviour is easy to verify automatically, and only the inherently hard-to-verify parts are left for human judgement. This spans training-time and inference-time, design/development-time and runtime, model-level and system-level, and includes not only classical correctness but also preference alignment, interpretability, and human oversight.

As function code migrates into models and AI takes over more of the coding and testing loop, the human role shifts toward intent specification, decomposition, constraint design, and strategic oversight. The talk outlines an emerging engineering practice, design and human oversight patterns for AIware-centric systems, and explores how this redefinition of verification, architecture, and human responsibility will reshape software engineering in the coming decade.

Bio: Qinghua Lu is the Acting Research Director of Software and Computational Systems (SCS) Research Program at CSIRO, specialising in AI engineering and responsible AI. She was the winner of Asia-Pacific Women in AI Trailblazer Award in 2023. She is the lead author of the world’s first practitioner-focused Responsible AI book, Responsible AI: Best Practices for Creating Trustworthy AI Systems, which reached #3 Amazon’s AI best-seller, and the co-author of Engineering AI Systems: Architecture and DevOps Essentials. Her Responsible AI Pattern Catalogue has been adopted by Australia’s National AI Centre Digital Pathways and the National Framework for the Assurance of AI in Government, and is widely used by industry to improve AI products or assess AI frameworks. She has led/co-led major national AI initiatives, including Australia’s Voluntary AI Safety Standards and Department of Industry’s General-Purpose AI Risk Assessment Methodology. Internationally, she represents Australia in key international AI safety initiatives, including the Frontier Model Forum.

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Bio: Silvio Meira is a professor and entrepreneur with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Kent (1985). He is Professor Emeritus at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE, Brazil), where he supervised more than 170 master’s and doctoral theses, with research spanning software engineering, digital ecosystems, innovation, and technology strategy. Meira is founder and Chief Scientist at TDS.company and Extraordinary Professor at cesar.school, both at Porto Digital. Meira is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur and a former fellow and faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. He has received several distinguished honors, including Brazil’s National Order of Scientific Merit.

He is best known as the founder and Chair of the Board of Porto Digital, one of Latin America’s most successful innovation hubs, home to some 500 companies and responsible for generating tens of thousands of jobs and substantial economic impact in Brazil’s Northeast. Meira is also the founder and former chief scientist of CESAR, an innovation institute that serves as one of Porto Digital’s intellectual and operational pillars and employs more than 1,400 people in Brazil and abroad. He serves on the boards of several major companies and institutions and on Brazil’s Presidential Council for Economic and Social Development. He was named Brazilian Economic Personality of the Year by O Globo, Brazil’s most influential national newspaper. Meira received the title of Eminent Engineer of the Year 2023 from Brazil’s Institute of Engineering.

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Abstract: TBA

Bio: Alexander Serebrenik is a full professor of social software engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. His work tends to involve theories and methods both from within computer science (e.g., theory of socio-technical coordination; methods from natural language processing, machine learning) and from outside of computer science (e.g., organisational psychology). The underlying idea of his work is that of empiricism, i.e., that addressing software engineering challenges should be grounded in observation and experimentation, and requires a combination of the social and the technical perspectives. Alexander has co-authored a book “Evolving Software Systems” (Springer Verlag, 2014), “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering: Best Practices and Insights” (APress, 2024) and more than 250 scientific papers and articles. He is actively involved in organisation of scientific conferences and is member of the editorial board of several journals. He has won multiple best paper and distinguished reviewer awards. Alexander is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Contact him at a.serebrenik@tue.nl.

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Title: What We’ve Learned By Actually Talking to Practitioners about Software Supply Chain Security (and How we Do it)

Abstract: Software organizations largely did not anticipate how the software supply chain would become a deliberate attack vector. Software supply chain attacks are launched through components in ecosystems, such as npm; through build infrastructure, such as GitHub Actions; and through humans involved in producing software, such as project maintainers. Supply chain attacks have been increasing almost exponentially since 2020, affecting governments, software organizations, and citizens worldwide. Software practitioners can’t stand still. They have no choice but to take action to avoid exploitation, often using existing technology because their real focus is on delivering products. Researchers can innovate and create novel, holistic solutions that have an impact when their research is informed by direct knowledge of practical problems. In this talk, I will share the specific methods we use to interact with industry and government. I will share what we have learned about software supply chain security through this interaction and how this knowledge has informed the research of the 25 faculty and students in the Secure Software Supply Chain Center (S3C2). My goal is not only to share about software supply chain security but to provide you with a framework for interacting with practitioners so you can have as much impact as possible on the software industry.

Bio: Laurie Williams is the Goodnight Distinguished University Professor of Security Sciences in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Laurie is the director of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Secure Software Supply Chain Center (S3C2), and co-director of the NSA-sponsored North Carolina Partnership for Cybersecurity Excellence (NC-PaCE) and the NCSU Secure Computing Institute. Laurie is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow. Laurie's research focuses on software security, software processes, and empirical software engineering.