The Future of Software at the center of IC Research day 2018
© 2018 EPFL / Murielle Gerber
The 22nd edition of the IC Research Day brought over 400 members from academia and industry to the SwissTech Convention Center this past Thursday. Experts in the fields of software engineering discussed the progress made, as well as potential future directions of this rapidly evolving field.
Software has revolutionized all areas of life from the economy to interpersonal communication. While software remains imperfect, as bugs, failures and security flaws demonstrate, many challenges still lie ahead to improve its reliability and reduce its flaws. With this in mind, IC Research Day Chairs, Professors Viktor Kuncak, George Candea, Jim Larus and Martin Odersky invited keynote speakers Prof. Katerina Argyraki, Dr. Rustan Leino and Dr. Erik Meijer to provide their view on how to address some of the challenges of the field.
After a welcome note by Prof. Andreas Mortensen, EPFL’s Vice President for Research, and an introduction to the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) by Dean Jim Larus, Dr. Rustan Leino (Amazon) outlined his view on the future of software engineering. Dr. Leino engaged the audience in a lively demonstration of his automated verification tool, Dafny, thus making a convincing case that program verification is not only a fun and productive way to develop programs that are correct by construction, but it also guides program development itself.
Prof. Katerina Argyraki (EPFL) described how software was disrupting computer networks, as they incorporate more and more sophisticated functions implemented in software, such as intrusion detection, transcoding, and caching. Prof. Argyraki showed that such flexibility need not come at the cost of bugs and unpredictable behavior, and presented ways to formally verify network functions without requiring developers to become verification experts.
Living up to the expectation of stirring up controversy, Dr. Erik Meijer (Facebook) warned the audience that machine learning was "eating software" and provided his vision of "Software 2.0”. Drawing on his extensive experience in developing languages, tools and frameworks at the forefront of industry, Dr. Meijer colorfully painted a new world in which learning from data replaces manual programming practices.
The participants of the day also had the opportunity to discover innovative research projects led by Ph.D. students of the IC school. After a very close vote, Arzu Güneysu Ozgur (CHILI) was given the Best Presentation Award for “Gamification of Rehabilitation”, El Mahdi El Mhamdi (LPD) was selected as the first runner-up with “Adversarial Machine Learning in Byzantium”, and Maaz Mohiuddin (LCA2) chosen as the second runner-up with “RaaSS: Reliability as a Software Service.” The day concluded successfully with the participants already anticipating the next edition, which will take place on June 6, 2019.
For further information, please visit https://icresearchday.epfl.ch/.
