Keynotes

Bashar Nuseibeh

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Title:Humane Software Engineering: Moral Ambition, Prosociality, and More-Than-Human

Abstract: Software engineering has long been concerned with building systems right. But have we been ambitious enough about building the right systems? This talk explores a more humane software engineering: one that treats the purposes and consequences of what we build as core engineering concerns. Three connected ideas frame this exploration. Moral ambition asks not only how software can avoid harm, but what good it can help make possible. Prosociality asks how software can support the relationships and conditions through which people care for and cooperate with one another. More-Than-Human extends our concern beyond people alone, to other living beings and the environments we share. These ideas raise difficult questions about whose values count, what engineering can legitimately claim, and what must be learned from lived experience. The aim is not less engineering, but engineering that is more ambitious in what it seeks, more purposeful in what it builds, and more attentive to what happens in use.

Bio: Bashar Nuseibeh is Professor of Computing and Executive Dean of the School of Science & Technology at City St George’s, University of London. He is Emeritus Professor of Computing at The Open University and was previously Chief Scientist of Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre. He is also Adjunct Professor of Software and Systems at Trinity College Dublin and Visiting Professor at University College Dublin. His research spans software and requirements engineering, adaptive systems, and security and privacy. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and as Chair of the ICSE Steering Committee. His software engineering awards include the IEEE Harlan D. Mills Award and an ICSE Most Influential Paper Award. He is a Fellow of ACM and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea.

Mark Harman

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Title: Automated Verification and Testing of Agentic AI

Abstract: Agentic AI enhances our ability to automate verification and testing, while sharply intensifying their difficulty and impact. Such intensified demands and expanded opportunities apply to coding agents, to agents deployed within organizations, and to agents deployed to end users. This talk reviews the ways AI has already reshaped the approach, philosophy, and purpose of automated testing and verification, setting out open scientific and technical problems for the software engineering research community, whose contributions and insights have never been more important.

Bio: Mark is a full professor at UCL and a full-time Senior Research Scientist at Meta, which acquired his startup, Majicke, in 2017. His work has over 50,000 citations and has been used by Microsoft, Google, Ericsson, Motorola, and Daimler. His automated unit and end-to-end testing are embedded in Meta's core infrastructure, testing products relied on by over 3 billion people and 200 million businesses. He received the IEEE Harlan D. Mills Award and ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award in 2019, and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2020) and the ACM Software Engineering Academy (2026).

Gail Murphy

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Title: The Human Work of Engineering Software with AI

Abstract: AI agents now write, review, and repair code at scale, yet they are unlike any participant software engineering has had before. Their reasoning is opaque, their behaviour emerges in ways their builders cannot fully predict, and the same request can yield different results from one run to the next. The ways we have built confidence in software and in the people who write it do not transfer. This talk asks what that means for the humans in the loop. What mitigations do these properties demand? How should humans engage with AI in development so that their involvement is meaningful rather than nominal? And what must our research community do now to make this possible?

Bio: Gail C. Murphy is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of British Columbia and also currently serving as President and CEO of Vancouver’s Science World (with a great informal title of nerd-in-chief). Previously she also served as UBC’s Vice President Research and Innovation. Gail’s research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. Gail is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a co-founder of Tasktop Technologies Inc, an enterprise software company that was acquired by Planview Inc. in 2022.