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The following two tutorials will be offered on Tuesday, April 29, 2025 during ICSE 2025
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Tutorial 1 (morning) Quantum Software Testing
You will be able to sign up for these separately during registration. The half-day registration fee will apply for each. Both include a break and lunch.
Tutorial 1: Quantum Software Testing
Tuesday: 9 a.m. to 12:30 with a half hour break:
Presenters: Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Laboratory, and Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway; Xinyi Wang, Simula Research Laboratory and the University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; Asmar Muqeet, Simula Research Laboratory and the University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Quantum software testing (QST) ensures the dependability of quantum software that executes on quantum computers or their simulators. Such dependability assurance is from both functional and non-functional perspectives. There has been an increasing interest in QST. As a result, introducing this topic to the ICSE conference audience will further raise the interest of young researchers, senior researchers, and practitioners interested in this area. This tutorial will introduce quantum computing in general, followed by an introduction to quantum software engineering. Next, it will cover QST in detail from various perspectives, such as an introduction to the topic, the current state of the art, some automated testing approaches, and future research directions. Finally, we will also demonstrate quantum software testing tools to show these tools in action.
Target audience
Given the basic nature of this tutorial, it is suitable for anyone.
Learning objectives
- Introduction to quantum computing
- Brief introduction to quantum software engineering
- Provide researchers and practitioners with a quick start to quantum software testing
Outline
- Introduction to quantum computing
- Introduction to quantum programming
- A brief introduction to quantum software engineering
- Introduction to quantum software testing
- Current literature on quantum software testing
- Introduction to a set of quantum software testing techniques in detail
- Current limitations and research directions
- Demonstration of quantum software testing tools
Bios of the presenters
Dr. Shaukat Ali is a Chief Research Scientist, Research Professor, and Head of the Department at Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway. He also holds an adjunct position at Oslo Metropolitan University. He focuses on devising novel methods for developing cyber-physical systems by applying various advanced techniques, such as artificial intelligence, digital twins, and quantum computing. He has led many national and European projects related to testing, search-based software engineering, model-based system engineering, and quantum software engineering. He regularly serves as a program committee member for software engineering conferences (e.g., ASE, FSE, ICSE-SEIP, ICST) and organizing committees. Additionally, he serves as an associate editor for ACM TOSEM and Springer EMSE journals and is the steering committee chair for ICST and SSBSE. He is one of the first research scholars in the world to establish the field of quantum software testing. He is a co-founder of the international workshop on quantum software engineering and the international conference on quantum software. He also represents Simula in various quantum computing research and industrial networks nationally and internationally. Link: https://www.simula.no/people/shaukat
Xinyi Wang is a PhD student at Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway, and the University of Oslo. She has been working in the quantum software testing domain since 2020. Her research interests also include applying quantum machine learning algorithms to tackle classical software engineering challenges in industry. Link: https://www.simula.no/people/xinyi
Asmar Muqeet is a PhD student at Simula Research Laboratory and the University of Oslo, Norway. His research centers on quantum software testing, with a particular focus on developing noise-aware testing techniques. These methods aim to address the challenges presented by real quantum computers and enhance the reliability of quantum software testing when applied in practical, real-world scenarios. Link: https://www.simula.no/people/asmar
Tutorial 2: Social, Legal, Ethical, Empathetic and Cultural Requirements: from Elicitation to Verification
Tuesday: 14:00 to 17:30 with a half hour break:
Presenters: Lina Marsso, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; Sinem Getir Yaman, University of York, York, UK; Pedro Ribeiro, University of York, York, UK ; Isobel Standen, University of York, York, UK; Marsha Chechik, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
This is the first ICSE tutorial that addresses specification, debugging, and compliance with social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural (SLEEC) requirements for AI and autonomous systems. As the interaction between these systems and humans continues to grow, the importance of embedding these considerations into the design and development process increases. Attendees will be introduced to state-of-the-art multi-disciplinary methodologies relevant to practitioners. The tutorial presents the challenges posed by SLEEC requirements, and highlights the necessity of engaging the software engineering community in tackling these issues. Lastly, the tutorial brings together for the first time our recent research on the elicitation, specification, validation and verification of SLEEC requirements for AI and autononous systems, which was shorlisted for a Best Paper Award at ETAPS 2023 (https://shorturl.at/c76Tl) , and received a Distiguished Paper Award at ICSE 2024 (https://shorturl.at/jmD0h).
Target audience
This tutorial is targeted at early-career researchers and students, as well as researchers and practitioners, with or without a technical background, who are interested in the social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural aspects of autonomous systems. We expect participants to range from computer science to social science experts, including students, with an interest in requirements elicitation as well as in the verification of software designs with respect to such requirements.
Learning objectives
The tutorial will deliver a series of short lectures interspersed with practical sessions based on tools, to achieve the following learning objectives:
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LO1: Understanding of the role and challenges associated with SLEEC requirements in software engineering, given that they address complex issues that necessitate collaboration across technical and social disciplines.
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LO2: Ability to apply a methodology for specifying these requirements and use a domain-specific language to formalize them for simple autonomous systems. (This methodology has been co-developed by a multidisciplinary team of software engineers with expertise in verification, ethicists, lawyers, roboticists, and social psychologists.)
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LO3: Knowledge of state-of-the-art methods for identifying, debugging, and ensuring compliance with a SLEEC requirements set, developed to be accessible and effective for stakeholders with both technical and non-technical backgrounds and assessed on a large number of real-world case studies available in a repository.
Outline
The tutorial is organized into two main parts:
Part 1: SLEEC rule elicitation & specification
- Introduction to SLEEC requirements and paradigm (methodology)
- SLEEC requirements language, illustrate the semantics with scenarios
- Elicitation
- SLEEC rule specification in the tooling
Part II: SLEEC rule consistency validation & verification
- SLEEC requirements well-formedness issues detection and resolution
- SLEEC requirements compliance verification
- SLEEC wellformedness and compliance verification in the tooling
Hands-On Exercises
The tutorial will have two hands-on exercises, each lasting 30 minutes, with participants working in pairs and utilizing a specialized tool. The first hands-on exercise using the IDE to specify new SLEEC requirements for an assitive robot, ALMI (learning objective LO2). And the second hands-on exercise, where participants will use the tooling to identify and resolve SLEEC well-formedness or compliance issues for ALMI. The tools will be available for participants to access either online through a web interface or via virtual machines they will be able to install on their own laptops. During the tutorial, one of the facilitators will provide direct technical support.
Bios of the presenters
Dr. Lina Marsso (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~lmarsso/) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, with a background in formal methods for software engineering. Her research focuses on modeling, verifying, and testing software requirements and designs for autonomous systems, including SLEEC requirements. She has experience presenting the SLEEC requirement verification components of the SLEEC methodology to software engineering audiences, including talks at conferences such as ASE, ICSE, and RE 2024, as well as at multi-disciplinary research group meetings.
Dr. Sinem Getir Yaman (https://sinemgetir.github.io/) is a postdoctoral researcher in the University of York’s Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on methods for the modeling and verification of non-functional requirements, including SLEEC requirements, for software quality evaluation under uncertainty. Her background is in formal methods, and she is the lead developer of the SLEECVAL toolkit. She has experience of presenting the technical components of the methodology to software engineering audiences, e.g., through talks at conferences such as ETAPS~2023, giving tutorial at ASE~2023 and at large research programme meetings.
Dr. Pedro Ribeiro (https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/people/pfr) is a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of York and a member of the RoboStar centre of excellence. He has over a decade of experience on formal modelling and verification with applications to modern software engineering approaches, and is one of the core developers of RoboTool and its integration with the SLEEC toolkit. He has experience in giving talks to a variety of stakeholders including at multi-disciplinary research programme meetings and international conferences such as iFM and ICTAC. He has also been a member of several programme committees, including artifact review committees, in the area of formal methods, and is a co-founder of Formal Method’s Europe (FME) communications committee. Isobel Standen (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/isobel-standen) is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of York and a member of the UKRI ‘Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node in Resilience’. Her research focuses on eliciting requirements for socially responsible and trustworthy autonomous systems. She has experience presenting her work to multidisciplinary audiences, including those in philosophy and computer science, both in England and Toronto. Additionally, she has presented in research group meetings and taught philosophy seminars to undergraduate students.
Prof. Marsha Chechik (https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~chechik/) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Prof. Chechik’s research interests are in modeling and reasoning about software. She has authored over 200 papers in formal methods, software specification and verification, computer security, and requirements engineering. She has presented the SLEEC verification methodology in the Stanford Research Institute and the Marktoberdorf formal method summer schools in 2024.