DAASE: Dynamic Adaptive Automated Software Engineering
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Computer Science
Abstract
Current software development processes are expensive, laborious and error prone. They achieve adaptivity at only a glacial pace, largely through enormous human effort, forcing highly skilled engineers to waste significant time adapting many tedious implementation details. Often, the resulting software is equally inflexible, forcing users to also rely on their innate human adaptivity to find "workarounds". As the letters of support from the DAASE industrial partners demonstrate, this creates a pressing need for greater automation and adaptivity.
Suppose we automate large parts of the development process using computational search. Requirements engineering, project planning and testing now become unified into a single automated activity. As requirements change, the project plans and associated tests are adapted to best suit the changes. Now suppose we further embed this adaptivity within the software product itself. Smaller changes to the operating environment can now be handled automatically. Feedback from the operating environment to the development process will also speed adaption of both the software product and process to much larger changes that cannot be handled by such in-situ adaptation.
This is the new approach to software engineering DAASE seeks to create. It places computational search at the heart of the processes and products it creates and embeds adaptivity into both. DAASE will also create an array of new processes, methods, techniques and tools for a new kind of software engineering, radically transforming the theory and practice of software engineering. DAASE will develop a hyper-heuristic approach to adaptive automation. A hyper-heuristic is a methodology for selecting or generating heuristics. Most heuristic methods in the literature operate on a search space of potential solutions to a particular problem. However, a hyper-heuristic operates on a search space of heuristics.
We do not underestimate the challenges this research agenda poses. However, we believe we have the team, partners and programme plan that will achieve the ambitious aim. DAASE integrates two teams of researchers from the Operational Research and Search Based Software Engineering communities. Both groups of researchers are widely regarded as world leading, having pioneered the fields of Hyper-Heuristics and Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE); the two key fields that DAASE brings together.
Suppose we automate large parts of the development process using computational search. Requirements engineering, project planning and testing now become unified into a single automated activity. As requirements change, the project plans and associated tests are adapted to best suit the changes. Now suppose we further embed this adaptivity within the software product itself. Smaller changes to the operating environment can now be handled automatically. Feedback from the operating environment to the development process will also speed adaption of both the software product and process to much larger changes that cannot be handled by such in-situ adaptation.
This is the new approach to software engineering DAASE seeks to create. It places computational search at the heart of the processes and products it creates and embeds adaptivity into both. DAASE will also create an array of new processes, methods, techniques and tools for a new kind of software engineering, radically transforming the theory and practice of software engineering. DAASE will develop a hyper-heuristic approach to adaptive automation. A hyper-heuristic is a methodology for selecting or generating heuristics. Most heuristic methods in the literature operate on a search space of potential solutions to a particular problem. However, a hyper-heuristic operates on a search space of heuristics.
We do not underestimate the challenges this research agenda poses. However, we believe we have the team, partners and programme plan that will achieve the ambitious aim. DAASE integrates two teams of researchers from the Operational Research and Search Based Software Engineering communities. Both groups of researchers are widely regarded as world leading, having pioneered the fields of Hyper-Heuristics and Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE); the two key fields that DAASE brings together.
Planned Impact
Training: The experience that our (many) early career researchers will obtain will be highly valuable and transferable: optimisation is a generic concern, widely applicable to many engineering problems (not merely those found in software engineering). DAASE will facilitate a wide-ranging and comprehensive programme of research training that will encompass exposure to different research communities and a wide range of different industrial environments. We plan internal research training, industrial secondments, international outreach visits and cross-site collaboration to maximise DAASE's potential to offer our team the best possible opportunities to develop their career, skills and expertise.
General Public: We plan to reach the public through direct engagement activities, print and broadcast media and by creating smart phone and social media apps that inform and explain. This activity will be headed up by Drs. Sue Black and Peter Bentley, both of whom have outstanding track records of media engagement and advocacy of science and engineering. The section on `Advocacy for Engineering and the Physical Sciences' in the case for support explains this in more detail.
SMEs: DAASE has the potential to directly impact hundreds of SMEs. This is why UCL has committed to appoint (and fund) the full-time DAASE Business Development Manager to ensure that the project collaborates with an order of magnitude more SMEs than could otherwise be possible.
DAASE will benefit from significant and sustained support and interaction with a large set of industrial partners, including,
IBM and Microsoft (representing the software industry), BT, Ericsson and Motorola (representing the telecoms sector) and ABB, Berner&Mattner and Honda (representing the manufacturing sector). We also set out more detailed plans in the "Pathways to Impact" document, explaining how we shall use these DAASE partners to experiments with our ideas, evaluate new techniques, pose industrial challenges and to provide support and consultancy concerning the industrial application of DAASE techniques. Through this interaction with leaders in the field DAASE will seek to impact the immediate industrial partners. The Business Development Manager will ensure that DAASE also reaches out to and impacts a far wider pool of SMEs.
General Public: We plan to reach the public through direct engagement activities, print and broadcast media and by creating smart phone and social media apps that inform and explain. This activity will be headed up by Drs. Sue Black and Peter Bentley, both of whom have outstanding track records of media engagement and advocacy of science and engineering. The section on `Advocacy for Engineering and the Physical Sciences' in the case for support explains this in more detail.
SMEs: DAASE has the potential to directly impact hundreds of SMEs. This is why UCL has committed to appoint (and fund) the full-time DAASE Business Development Manager to ensure that the project collaborates with an order of magnitude more SMEs than could otherwise be possible.
DAASE will benefit from significant and sustained support and interaction with a large set of industrial partners, including,
IBM and Microsoft (representing the software industry), BT, Ericsson and Motorola (representing the telecoms sector) and ABB, Berner&Mattner and Honda (representing the manufacturing sector). We also set out more detailed plans in the "Pathways to Impact" document, explaining how we shall use these DAASE partners to experiments with our ideas, evaluate new techniques, pose industrial challenges and to provide support and consultancy concerning the industrial application of DAASE techniques. Through this interaction with leaders in the field DAASE will seek to impact the immediate industrial partners. The Business Development Manager will ensure that DAASE also reaches out to and impacts a far wider pool of SMEs.
Organisations
- University College London (Lead Research Organisation)
- University of Leuven (Collaboration)
- Government Communications Headquarters (Project Partner)
- Motorola (United Kingdom) (Project Partner)
- ABB Group (Project Partner)
- Northrop Grumman Park Air Systems (Project Partner)
- IBM (Project Partner)
- BT Research (Project Partner)
- Assystem (Germany) (Project Partner)
- Ericsson (Sweden) (Project Partner)
- Honda (Germany) (Project Partner)
- Microsoft (United States) (Project Partner)
Publications
Abrahão S
(2018)
Definition and evaluation of a COSMIC measurement procedure for sizing Web applications in a model-driven development environment
in Information and Software Technology
Adair J
(2018)
Applications of Evolutionary Computation
Adair J
(2017)
Advances in Computational Intelligence Systems
Adair J
(2019)
Local optima networks for continuous fitness landscapes
Adriaensen S
(2015)
A benchmark set extension and comparative study for the HyFlex framework
Al-Subaihin A
(2015)
App store mining and analysis
Al-Subaihin A
(2021)
App Store Effects on Software Engineering Practices
in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Al-Subaihin A
(2016)
Clustering Mobile Apps Based on Mined Textual Features
Alam MS
(2022)
Repurposing of existing antibiotics for the treatment of diabetes mellitus.
in In silico pharmacology
| Description | The DAASE Project has not only fundamentally changed the science of software engineering, but also the practice. The research has had a direct impact on over 2 billion people worldwide, who use software systems for communications, community building and social networking, which were tested and optimized using the project's research. The project developed techniques to automatically design test cases, to explore and find bugs in software systems, and also techniques for improving software, to enhance its performance and remove problems identified by the testing. This work has been deployed by several companies including KLM and Facebook. The DAASE project has also fundamentally shifted the locus of research within the scientific community. The project ran from 2012 to 2019, and during that time the number of research papers and active researchers in search based software engineering has grown exponentially. Recent publications [1,2] that survey the area attest to both the growth in interest and activity in the scientific community, and the seminal role played by the DAASE project and it's researchers, many of whom have gone on to promotions and/or industrial secondments. DAASE researchers won seven best/distinguished paper awards. Its research won five Hummies (http://www.human-competitive.org/awards): one gold, two silver and two bronze. Its research also won two SSBSE Challenge tracks. The DAASE project co-PI, Mark Harman, won two distinguished scientific awards for his work on DAASE: IEEE Harlan Mills 2019 and ACM Outstanding Research 2019. DAASE members have given keynotes about DAASE at all the leading international conferences in the area. |
| Exploitation Route | ? Facebook acquired a startup based on DAASE research and deployed a DAASE-based tooling that now directly impacts approximately one third of the global population; ? KLM uses DAASE technology for airline schedules; ? Automatically evolved changes to BarraCUDA have been deployed and used as open source http://seqbarracuda.sourceforge.net/; ? Automatically evolved changes to ViennaRNA are deployed and used http://www.tbi.univie.ac.at/RNA/; ? Janus Rehabilitation, Reykjavik Iceland uses DAASE techniques, including automated program repair, to keep the costs of developing their management system to a minimum and has also helped their treatment planning and assessment in various ways. |
| Sectors | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Financial Services, and Management Consultancy,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Transport,Other |
| URL | http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk |
| Description | DAASE work has been deployed by several companies, including KLM and Facebook. The deployment at Facebook was made possible by the acquisition by the company founded by several of the key researchers from the project, including the principal investigator, Professor Mark Harman, and PhD student Ke Mao and an Associate Professor, Yue Jia. This team, acquired by Facebook, went on to work with others at Facebook, based in London, to deploy the Sapienz system, which automatically designs test cases. The DAASE PhD student, Alexandru Marginean, subsequently worked with them to deploy automated program improvement. Through these deployments, the research work has directly reached and touched the lives of over two billion people worldwide. Through this acquisition, DAASE research has been deployed into Facebook production systems, and software testing processes, running continuously to test software systems of many millions of lines of code. This deployment is a testament to the industrial scalability of the scientific work, its profound and wide-reaching impact; Over 1.5 billion people use Facebook products every day (2.7 billion per month), with the result that their lives have been directly affected by this research project. This first was reported by Facebook in August 2018, and the blog post reporting it went immediately viral, being picked up by SD Times, CNET, SiliconANGLE (further picked up by SlashDot), Startup World, The Register, TechCrunch (further picked up by the Verge), ZDNet, The Next Web (further picked up by Wheaton Business Journal), Fossbytes, and JAXenter, already seeing recruitment enquiries as a result. Following a further press event, Sapienz was also picked up and reported on by Forbes and subsequently,byTom'sGuide,TechworldfromIDG,VentureBeat,andV ersion2. Additional Real World Impact ? KLM uses DAASE technology for airline schedules; ? Automatically evolved changes to BarraCUDA have been deployed and used as open source http://seqbarracuda.sourceforge.net/; ? Automatically evolved changes to ViennaRNA are deployed and used http://www.tbi.univie.ac.at/RNA/; ? Janus Rehabilitation, Reykjavik Iceland uses DAASE techniques, including automated program repair, to keep the costs of developing their management system to a minimum and has also helped their treatment planning and assessment in various ways. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2012 |
| Sector | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Financial Services, and Management Consultancy,Transport,Other |
| Impact Types | Economic |
| Description | Distinguished Visiting Fellowship for Prof. Darrell Whitley, |
| Amount | £1,400 (GBP) |
| Organisation | SICSA Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 01/2015 |
| End | 02/2015 |
| Description | Dynamic Optimization of Software Architectures for Cloud Applications |
| Amount | £12,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | The Royal Society |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | |
| Description | FAIME: A Feature based Framework to Automatically Integrate and Improve Metaheuristics via Examples |
| Amount | £100,064 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/N002849/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 01/2015 |
| End | 09/2016 |
| Description | Mathematical models and algorithms for allocating scarce airport resources |
| Amount | £2,262,469 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/M020258/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2015 |
| End | 09/2021 |
| Description | Robust Bus Vehicle Scheduling Based on Stochastic Running Times |
| Amount | ¥490,000 (CNY) |
| Organisation | National Natural Science Foundation of China |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | China |
| Start | 01/2016 |
| End | 12/2019 |
| Description | The Internet of Things |
| Amount | £4,930,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | United Kingdom Research and Innovation |
| Department | CCF |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | |
| Description | Vidia GPU card worth $1000 |
| Amount | $1,000 (USD) |
| Organisation | NVIDIA |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | Global |
| Start | |
| Description | nVidia's Hardware Grant Program |
| Amount | $1,000 (USD) |
| Organisation | NVIDIA |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | Global |
| Start | |
| Title | Astraiea |
| Description | Astraiea is a software package is an expert system for statistics, providing researchers with a principled means for fair comparison of algorithms. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2015 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Requests made for further information. |
| URL | https://github.com/JerrySwan/Astraiea |
| Title | High order mutations of the Triangle Program |
| Description | Trying all hopeful high order mutations to source code shows none of the first order schema of triangle software engineering benchmark are deceptive. Indeed these unit blocks lead to all global optima. Suggesting program improvements may not be as hard to find as is often assumed. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | Although the triangle program is small, the number of possible triangle programs is huge. We have fully explored a regular subset of it. We reduced the size of its search space by considering only potential improvements to the existing code made by replacing its comparisons and by restricting the comparator mutations. This enabled us to analyse a systematic subset of the whole improvement fitness landscape. Solutions in the subset will still be solutions in the full problem. There are many solutions all of which are readily found by first order schema analysis. Suggesting the program fitness landscape is not as difficult to search as is often assumed. |
| URL | http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/ftp/gp-code/triangle.tar.gz |
| Title | BarraCUDA |
| Description | Changes made to open source program BarraCUDA have been incorporated into the official distribution. The main changes were produced by "genetic improvement". Subsequent maintenance and bugfixes have been made both by the UCL GGGP project and the university of Cambridge. The GI'ed version of BarraCUDA has been downloaded from SourceForge more than 3000 times. |
| Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Plans made for further related activity Requests made for further information The GI'ed version of BarraCUDA has been downloaded from SourceForge more than 3000 times. |
| URL | http://seqbarracuda.sourceforge.net/ |
| Title | Fitness Landscape of the Triangle Program data local optima network |
| Description | Data from the graphs that describe the fitness Landscape of the Triangle Program local optima network http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/ppsn2016/triangle/ http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/egp2017/triangle/ |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Not aware of any impact |
| Title | GP Bibliography |
| Description | The GP Bibliography is a repository of all publications on the topic of genetic programming, which is maintained by Bill Langdon (William B. Langdon). The repository has been available since before 2006, but since 2011, its maintenance has been supported by the EPSRC project GISMO, which funds, in full, Dr Langdon. It was started by Dr langdon when he was at the University of Birmingham, though he has been at University College London since 2010. The University of Birmingham continues to host the repository, while support for its maintenance and update by Dr langdon comes from UCL, through GISMO Project. Before the GISMO Project, Dr langdon was funded by the CREST platform grant and SEBASE projects. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Repository contains over 7000 entries, and is widely used by other researchers. It is the first point of call for any researcher working in genetic programming, in order to search for and find relevant information on previous research in this area. |
| URL | http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~wbl/biblio/ |
| Title | Improved OpenCV SEEDS test and $50K challange images |
| Description | Bench mark computer pictures from the OpenCV SEEDS test and $50K challange images http:// http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/ssbse2016/acgi/ |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Not aware of any impact |
| Title | RN/16/04 notme benchmark |
| Description | Bench mark data set for research note RN/16/04 |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Not aware of any impact |
| URL | http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/gggp/notme/ |
| Title | RN/16/10 Cambridge Epigenetix synthetic epigenetics data |
| Description | Datasets supplied by Cambridge Epigenetix to test programs which match next generation high sequence epigenetics DNA sequences https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cegx-test-001/tmwg-example-files/SIM03_S1_L001_R1_001.fastq.gz https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cegx-test-001/tmwg-example-files/SIM03_S1_L001_R2_001.fastq.gz https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cegx-test-001/tmwg-example-files/hs38DH_bwameth.tar.gz |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Not aware of any impact |
| Title | SBSE repository |
| Description | This collects the work which address the software engineering problems using metaheuristic search optimisation techniques (i. e. Genetic Algorithms) into the Repository of Publications on Search Based Software Engineering |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2010 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This repository is the first point of contact for all researchers working in search based software engineering. It has been used by a number of other researchers in systematic literature reviews, as a source of comprehensive information regarding all papers on this topic. It contains over 1200 entries, and lists over 1500 different researchers. A number of different analyses have been built on top of the repository, and it has been used by many researchers in the construction of their related work. |
| URL | http://crestweb.cs.ucl.ac.uk/resources/sbse_repository/ |
| Title | UCLAppa datasets |
| Description | We provide a dataset, extracted from blackberry world store, concerning price, popularity, ratings, and extracted feature information for each app. We provide an analysis of the correlations between the data, and plan to extend this database further as a resource for the community. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2013 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Several other researchers have already used our database, and many more have used the research method we advocate for extracting feature information from app stores. |
| URL | http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Y.Jia/projects/app_store_mining/ |
| Description | Metaheuristics in the Large - MitL |
| Organisation | University of Leuven |
| Country | Belgium |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The `Metaheuristics in the Large' ('MitL') research community initiative seeks to address systemic research issues (such as lack of reproducibility/scalability) and facilitating large-scale knowledge discovery. This initiative has attracted unprecedented interest and includes some of the most eminent members of the international community. The associated mailing list has over 50 self-volunteered members. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Jerry Swan helped set it up |
| Impact | The associated mailing list has over 50 self-volunteered members. |
| Start Year | 2016 |
| Title | EvaClone |
| Description | Clone detection finds application to many software engineering activities such as comprehension and refactoring. However, the confounding configuration choice problem poses a widely-acknowledged threat to the validity of previous empirical analyses. We introduce a search based solution, EvaClone, that finds suitable configurations for empirical studies. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2013 |
| Impact | The paper that reported this tool has already attracted a large number of citations, but since the tall was anything available for a year, we are not yet aware those were using it (we would only become aware of its use when it appears as an explicit mention in a subsequent research paper) |
| URL | http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Y.Jia/projects/eva_clone/ |
| Title | Flexeme |
| Description | This project provides several implementations for commit untagling and proposes a new representation of git patches by projecting the patch onto a PDG. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | Advancing the state of the art in commit untangling via two new structures, the delta nameflow graph and delta PDG. |
| URL | https://github.com/PPPI/Flexeme |
| Title | Hyperion |
| Description | Common LS and EA frameworks (acting either metaheuristically or hyper-heuristically), demonstrating how to adapt ad hoc metaheuristics into an org.mitlware compatible format. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Although the libraries form an instrumental part of the 'Metaheuristics in the Large' initiative, there are, at present, no explicit metrics for impact. The associated libraries are being made publically available, and will be instrumented with a count of the number of downloads. |
| Title | Metaxa |
| Description | Basic utilities library for methods common to metaheuristics (e..g. proportional selection, cross-validation, reservoir sampling). |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Although the libraries form an instrumental part of the 'Metaheuristics in the Large' initiative, there are, at present, no explicit metrics for impact. The associated libraries are being made publically available, and will be instrumented with a count of the number of downloads. |
| Title | POSIT |
| Description | This a project to simultaneously provide language ID tags and Part-Of-Speech or compiler tags (which are taken from CLANG compilations of C and C++ code). The corpus is either code with comments annotated with CLANG compiler information and universal PoS tags for English, or StackOverflow. For StackOverflow we start from the data dump (which can be found here), and use a frequency based heuristic to annotate code snippets. The frequency data is made available under ./data/corpora/SO/frequency_map.json. To generate training data from StackOverflow, please use the scripts under ./src/preprocessor together with the Posts.xml file from the data dump linked above. Our model is a BiLSTM neural network with a Linear CRF and Viterbi decode to go from LSTM state to tags or language IDs. We use the same LSTM network and change only the CRF on top for the two tasks. We linearly combine the two objectives in the loss with a slightly smaller weight given to language IDs. We do not condition Tag output on language IDs in this version of the model. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | Enabled the study of mixed languages in softare artefacts, advancing the state of the art. |
| URL | https://github.com/PPPI/POSIT |
| Title | Picassevo |
| Description | Picassevo is a meeting of art and science: It uses intelligent optimising evolutionary algorithms to evolve pictures from a set of arbitrary polygons (many side shapes) with different colours and opacities. The algorithm, which is inspired by Darwinian evolution, simultaneously explores two conflicting objectives when deciding on the desirability of each picture: 1) Does it capture the essence of your portrait and 2) Is it artistically abstract? The algorithm seeks a trade-off between retaining the likeness and increasing the abstraction at the same time. Yue Jia developed this app. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2015 |
| Impact | The Picasevo app is available on the itunes store and so is accessible for anyone with an iphone/ipad. It gives the general public some insight and intuition into the concept of Pareto optimality and is a playful way of presenting research to the general public. |
| URL | https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/picassevo/id1084183364?mt=8 |
| Title | Sapienz |
| Description | Sapienz is an approach to Android testing that uses multi-objective search-based testing to automatically explore and optimise test sequences, minimising length, while simultaneously maximising coverage and fault revelation. Sapienz combines random fuzzing, systematic and search-based exploration, exploiting seeding and multi-level instrumentation. Sapienz significantly outperforms (with large effect size) both the state-of-the-art technique Dynodroid and the widely-used tool, Android Monkey, in 7/10 experiments for coverage, 7/10 for fault detection and 10/10 for fault-revealing sequence length. When applied to the top 1,000 Google Play apps, Sapienz found 558 unique, previously unknown crashes. So far we have managed to make contact with the developers of 27 crashing apps. Of these, 14 have confirmed that the crashes are caused by real faults. Of those 14, six already have developer-confirmed fixes. |
| Type Of Technology | Software |
| Year Produced | 2017 |
| Impact | The Sapienz SBSE testing technique is now running contunously 24/7 at Facebook, where the UK-based team have deployed it to continuously test Facebook's Android app, thereby impacting approximately 750,000,000 people world wide every day |
| Title | Templar |
| Description | A generic framework for generative hyper-heuristics. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Although the libraries form an instrumental part of the 'Metaheuristics in the Large' initiative, there are, at present, no explicit metrics for impact. The associated libraries are being made publically available, and will be instrumented with a count of the number of downloads. |
| Title | org.mitlware |
| Description | Core interfaces for metaheuristic interoperability. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Although the libraries form an instrumental part of the 'Metaheuristics in the Large' initiative, there are, at present, no explicit metrics for impact. The associated libraries are being made publically available, and will be instrumented with a count of the number of downloads. |
| Title | org.mitlware.problems |
| Description | Problem domain library in which domains are described polymorphically via org.mitlware interfaces |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Although the libraries form an instrumental part of the 'Metaheuristics in the Large' initiative, there are, at present, no explicit metrics for impact. The associated libraries are being made publicly available, and will be instrumented with a count of the number of downloads. |
| URL | https://github.com/MitLware |
| Title | org.mitlware.solutions |
| Description | Ubiquitous solution representations (bitvector,permutation,roots of polynomials). |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Although the libraries form an instrumental part of the 'Metaheuristics in the Large' initiative, there are, at present, no explicit metrics for impact. The associated libraries are being made publically available, and will be instrumented with a count of the number of downloads. |
| Company Name | MaJiCKe |
| Description | Bespoke Test Automation: We integrate automated Android testing into your development environment, working seamlessly with your existing tools, platforms, and frameworks. The team: Professor Mark Harman Dr. Yue Jia Mr. Ke Mao |
| Year Established | 2016 |
| Impact | Majicke was acquired by Facebook in February 2017, thereby injecting all three of the founders into the heart of the company where they work on development of technologies to help Facebook engineers work faster in their overall goal of making the world more open and connected. This presents a considerable recognition from industry in the value of the research done on the project. |
| Website | http://www.majicke.com/ |
| Company Name | Appredict |
| Description | We extract deep hidden data using advanced machine learning and optimisation techniques, based on world-leading and award-winning research from University College London. Unlike all the other offerings available, we go beneath the surface. Our analysis exposes profound relationships between the specific technical features of your apps' code, and their business performance. Understanding and optimising this critical end-to-end technical-to-business relationship is essential for revenue maximisation. The team: Professor Mark Harman Dr. Yue Jia Dr. Federica Sarro Mr. William Martin Dr. Yuanyuan Zhang |
| Year Established | 2015 |
| Impact | Appredict has given presentations to Google and Beidu, And has received interest from a number of small companies developing apps |
| Website | http://appredict.co.uk |
| Description | 2015 ACM/SIGEVO Foundations of Genetic Algorithms XIII (FOGA 2015) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Gabriela Ochoa helped with organising this conference |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://foga2015.dcs.aber.ac.uk/organisers.html |
| Description | 2nd Workshop on Genetic Improvement at GECCO 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Co-Chaired by Dr David R White and Dr Justyna Petke The growth in GI echoes a wider trend in research on the use of evolutionary and genetic search in optimising aspects of software engineering. For example, since 2002 there has been a track on Search Based Software Engineering at GECCO. There exists the dedicated SSBSE conference, and we now see the inauguration of regional conferences and workshops featuring or even dedicated to SBSE (in Brazil, China and recently the USA). In 2015 the inaugural Genetic Improvement Workshop was held in conjunction with GECCO. The workshop was a tremendous success. Genetic Improvement is one of the most exciting and growing applications of evolutionary search. Including "to appear", since 2000, there have been more than 70 papers in this area and interest is growing. GI research has won three GECCO Human Competitive Awards (Gold, Silver and Bronze) and two best papers, including at the International Conference on Software Engineering and GECCO. Furthermore, a special issue on Genetic Improvement in the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines journal is due to appear in the coming months. Whilst SBSE has traditionally been applied to software engineering problems there has been great interest in using it, particularly genetic programming, on software itself. Genetic Improvement (GI) uses computational search to improve software while retaining its partial functionality. The technique was first applied to parallelise programs and optimise and find compromises between non-functional properties of software, such as execution time and power consumption. This work led on to automated bug fixing in commercial software. More recently, it has been shown that GP can use human written software as a feed stock for GP and is able to evolve mutant software dedicated to solving particular problems. Another interesting area is grow and graft GP, where software is incubated outside its target human written code and subsequently grafted into it via GP. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://gecco-2016.sigevo.org/index.html/Workshops |
| Description | 39th CREST Open Workshop - Measuring, Testing and Optimising Computational Energy Consumption |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Estimates for the amount of global energy consumed by computation may very, but no commentator doubts its increase, with serious environmental implications. Users are also frustrated, all too aware of the computational limitations of inadequate battery life. Indeed, the largest component in many mobile devices is the battery. However, despite these pressing environmental and user needs, there remains a lack of work on computational energy testing and optimisation. The 39th CREST Open Workshop (COW) workshop will bring together those working on testing and optimisation with those working on computational energy measurement and its applications to investigate and develop computational energy testing and optimisation research and practice. Funding for the workshop is provided by the EPSRC projects GISMO (http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/gismo/) and DAASE (http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/39/ |
| Description | 45th CREST Open Workshop - Genetic Improvement |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Genetic Improvement (GI) aims to find improved versions of existing programs that retain some partial semantics of the original (and possibly some of its syntax too). GI has been used to improve many system aspects such as its correctness (through bug fixing) and resource consumption such as time, memory and energy. It has also been used for other kinds of improvement such as specialising and porting. Many and varied techniques have proved successful at improving programs, such as loop perforation, genetic programming, guided random search, transplantation and constraint-based synthesis. This workshop will bring together researchers working on Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE), Program Synthesis, Genetic Programming, Program Analysis and Manipulation. We will explore the possible applications, development of techniques, evaluation and theory. Funding for the workshop is provided by the EPSRC projects DAASE (http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk) and GGGP. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/45/ |
| Description | 5th Workshop on Evolutionary Computation for the Automated Design of Algorithms |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | How can we automatically generate algorithms on demand? While this was one of the original aims of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the early 1950s, and more recently Genetic Programming in the early 1990s, existing techniques have fallen-short of this elusive goal. This workshop will outline a number of steps in the right direction on the path to achieving this goal. In particular, this workshop will focus on the burgeoning field of hyper-heuristics which are meta-heuristics applied to a space of algorithms; i.e., any method of sampling a set of candidate algorithms. Genetic Programming has most famously been employed to this end, but random search and iterative hill-climbing have both also successfully been employed to automatically design novel (components of) algorithms. The main objective of this workshop is to discuss hyper-heuristics employing evolutionary computation methods for generating algorithms. These methods have the advantage of producing solutions that are applicable to any instance of a problem domain, instead of a solution specifically produced to a single instance of the problem. The areas of application of these methods include, for instance, data mining, machine learning, and optimization. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | 6th Genetic Improvement Workshop at ICSE 2019, 28th May 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The 6th International Workshop on Genetic Improvement @ ICSE 2019, 28th May 2019 Genetic Improvement is the application of evolutionary and search-based optimisation methods to the improvement of existing software. For example, it may be used to automate the process of bug-fixing or execution time optimisation. As academics in the field, we run the workshop to offer an opportunity for researchers to disseminate work, but most importantly to meet and discuss with other GI researchers. So far we had 5 editions of the workshop, four co-located with GECCO (in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018) and one with ICSE 2018. Since 2009 there have been four human competitive awards for work in GI (two Gold, one Silver and one Bronze) presented at GECCO and three best papers, including at the International Conference on Software Engineering and International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | http://geneticimprovementofsoftware.com/ |
| Description | Adding value to optimisation by interrogating fitness models - Dr Sandy Brownlee |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Presentation at Model Based Evolutionary Algorithms workshop at GECCO 2016 |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://homepages.cwi.nl/~bosman/mbea2016/ |
| Description | Approaches and Applications of Inductive Programming |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Dagstuhl Seminar 15442 on Approaches and Applications of Inductive Programming |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.dagstuhl.de/de/programm/kalender/semhp/?semnr=15442 |
| Description | Article on The Conversation - Computers will soon be able to fix themselves - are IT departments for the chop? |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Computers will soon be able to fix themselves - are IT departments for the chop?Robots and AI are replacing workers at an alarming rate, from simple manual tasks to making complex legal decisions and medical diagnoses. But the AI itself, and indeed most software, is still largely programmed by humans. By Saemundur Haraldsson, Alexander Brownlee and John R. Woodward |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://theconversation.com/computers-will-soon-be-able-to-fix-themselves-are-it-departments-for-the... |
| Description | Article on The Conversation - Computers will soon be able to fix themselves - are IT departments for the chop?Never mind the iPhone X, battery life could soon take a great leap forward |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Another suite of Apple iPhones, another media frenzy. Much has been written about the $999/£999 iPhone X, the demise of the home button, the "face ID" function, wireless charging and so on. Somewhere down the list of improvements was extra battery life, at least for the iPhone X, thanks to its new souped up A11 bionic processor. By Alexander Brownlee and Jerry Swan |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://theconversation.com/never-mind-the-iphone-x-battery-life-could-soon-take-a-great-leap-forwar... |
| Description | Associate Editor for the IEEE Software blog |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Federica Sarro is the Associate Editor for the IEEE Software blog. The goal of the blog is to present recent advances in the different research areas of software engineering via sharp, to-the-point, easily accessible blog posts. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://media.computer.org/images/test/blog.html |
| Description | Code 'transplant' could revolutionise programming - article |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | An article written about research into code transplanting - MuScalpel . This appeared on Wired.co.uk Research done by Bill Langdon, Mark Harman, Alex Marginean, Justyna Petke, Earl Barr and Yue Jia |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/30/code-organ-transplant-software-myscalpel |
| Description | Conference Track Organisation, Niching Methods for Multimodal Optimization, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This special session aimed to highlight the latest developments in niching methods, bring together researchers from academia and industries, and explore future research directions on this topic. We invited authors to submit original and unpublished work on niching methods. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~xiaodong/cec15-niching/ |
| Description | Conference Track Organisation, Search-Based Software Engineering and Self-* Search (SBSE-SS) Track, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is the application of search algorithms to the solution of software engineering tasks. We invited papers that address problems in the software engineering domain through the use of heuristic search techniques. We particularly encouraged papers demonstrating novel search strategies or the application of SBSE techniques to new problems in software engineering. Self-* search techniques incorporate ideas from adaptation and machine learning. The goal is to reduce the role of the human expert in the process of designing search algorithms, and to produce more generally applicable and robust methods. This will contribute to the long-standing challenge of self-adaptive software systems. Gabriela Ochoa helped organise this track. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2015/organizers-tracks.html#sbse |
| Description | Dagstuhl - Genetic Improvement of Software |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Recent work on Genetic Improvement (GI) has covered automatic bug repair and improving both functional and non-functional properties of existing software code. Non-functional improvements have included radical speeds ups and (particularly for low resource computational motes and mobile computing) reducing energy consumption, and memory footprint. In addition to automatic bug fixing, functional improvements have included growing and grafting in new functionality, automatic porting to new hardware (often parallel hardware such as GPU and SSE vector instructions), automatic tuning and transplanting functionality from existing often open source repositories like GitHub. These are exciting times but as highlighted by the recent Dagstuhl Seminar on Automated Program Repair (17022), there is a risk that lessons learnt in one area will only be exploited by that area. Therefore this Dagstuhl Seminar will draw participants from all corners of GI to contribute their thoughts on experiences, tools, datasets and benchmarks, validation, theoretical analysis and the ways forward. What will programming look like in ten years' time? How will GI in 2018 be thought of in 2038 or in 2050? The seminar will focus on various genetic improvement approaches and related areas where software has been reused for purpose of automated software improvement. The proposed topics of discussion include: software mutational robustness program repair non-functional software property improvement search-based approaches for software improvement data mining for GI |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=18052 |
| Description | Dr Earl Barr presentation at |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | AIFORSE Conference 2017 - the first global Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Software Engineering (SE) - will host on the 10th of November 2017 in Barcelona. The main Purpose of the Conference, first of all, is to build a Bridge between the most significant Players of the Software Engineering Industry from one side and the most advanced adopters of cutting-edge Applied Artificial Intelligence Technologies from another side. The Leaders and Experts of Software Engineering and pioneer Innovators of Artificial Intelligence in SE will meet on Communication Stage to accelerate the Development and increase the Efficiency of the Operations in the Industry. 12 Hours of Networking, Discussions, bright and unique Reports of the 10 best Speakers in the Industry. Speakers are Representatives of Companies from around the World, who already apply AI to the Software Engineering. They will not only disclose the Tools that help solve Problems faster and decrease Costs, but will also define the Development Vector of Software Engineering Industry. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://aiforse.org/conference-2017 |
| Description | Earl Barr - talk at Semmle |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Earl Barr presents his paper To Type or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in JavaScript at Semmle http://earlbarr.com/publications/typestudy.pdf |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://semmle.com/ |
| Description | Earl Barr attending invitation only workshop on software security, National Cyber Security Centre |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Invitation only workshop to discuss the requirements for an international collaborative effort and infrastructure to support large-scale empirical research on software security. The workshop was held in London on the 17th of December and was supported by the National Cyber Security Centre. The collective goal for the day was to develop a shared understanding of the challenges faced by research on software code analysis for cybersecurity and outline a roadmap for an international testbed infrastructure for large-scale experimental research on software security. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Earl Barr invited speaker CHOOSE forum in Switzerland |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The CHOOSE Forum 2018 is organized by the Zurich Empirical Software engineering Team (ZEST) at the University of Zurich, on behalf of CHOOSE. Earl Barr presented his paper Bimodal Software Engineering |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://choose.swissinformatics.org/events/choose-forum-2018-software-engineering-and-machine-learni... |
| Description | Earl Barr presents Bimodal Software Engineering at FLOC 2018: FEDERATED LOGIC CONFERENCE 2018, MLP PROGRAM |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Earl Barr presents Bimodal Software Engineering at FLOC 2018: FEDERATED LOGIC CONFERENCE 2018 in the MLP PROGRAM |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://easychair.org/smart-program/FLoC2018/MLP-program.html |
| Description | Earl Barr presents his paper Mining Semantic Loop Idioms @ FSE 2018 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Earl Barr presents his paper Mining Semantic Loop Idioms @ FSE 2018 in the Journal-First track Sun 4 - Fri 9 November 2018 Lake Buena Vista, Florida, United States |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://2018.fseconference.org/event/fse-2018-journal-first-mining-semantic-loop-idioms |
| Description | Earl Barr research visit to Monash University and University of Adelaide, Australia |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Earl Barr visited Monash University and University of Adelaide, Australia. He presented Bimodal Software Engineering at both Universities. Tuesday (Oct. 2nd) - Monash University 09:00-10:00 KEYNOTE (General Seminar, Earl Barr, UCL) - Bimodal Software Engineering https://www.monash.edu/it/our-research/research-seminars/events/events/2018/earl-barr-bimodal-software-engineering |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://www.monash.edu/it/our-research/research-seminars/events/events/2018/earl-barr-bimodal-softwa... |
| Description | Electronic Submissions Chair FSE 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Yue Jia was the Electronic Submissions Chair FSE 2015. This conference was attended by an international audience of peers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://esec-fse15.dei.polimi.it/team.html#oc |
| Description | Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization - 15th European Conference, EvoCOP 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Gabriela Ochoa was the program chair for Evo Cop - 15th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.evostar.org/2015/about_organisers.php |
| Description | Federica Sarro - Keynote SBST 2018 Gothenburg, Sweden |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | keynote given by Dr Federica Sarro at SBST in Gothenburg, Sweden. Title: Predictive analytics for software testing. This was the 11th International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing, May 28-29 2018. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://software.imdea.org/sbst18/ |
| Description | Federica Sarro Program Chair at ICPC 2019 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) is the premier venue for work in the area of program comprehension. It encompasses both human activities for comprehending the software and technologies for supporting such comprehension. ICPC 2019 promises to provide a quality forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to present and to discuss state-of-the-art results and best practices in the field of program comprehension. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://conf.researchr.org/committee/icpc-2019/icpc-2019-organization-committee |
| Description | Federica Sarro Steering Commitee Chair of SSBSE |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Federica Sarro Steering Commitee Chair of SSBSE Search-based Software Engineering (SBSE) is a research area focused on the formulation of software engineering problems as search problems, and the subsequent use of complex heuristic techniques to attain optimal solutions to such problems. A wealth of engineering challenges - from test generation, to design refactoring, to process organization - can be solved efficiently through the application of automated optimization techniques. SBSE is a growing field - sitting at the crossroads between AI, machine learning, and software engineering - and SBSE techniques have begun to attain human-competitive results. The Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering is a venue dedicated to the SBSE research field. The 11th symposium will be held this year in Talinn, Estonia, co-located with the 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. We invite the submission of high quality papers describing novel and original work in all areas of SBSE including, but not limited to, applications of SBSE to novel problems, theoretical analyses of search algorithms for software engineering, rigorous empirical evaluations of SBSE techniques, and reports of industrial experiences. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | http://ssbse19.mines-albi.fr/committees.html |
| Description | Genetic Programming to Genetic Improvement Programming: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This special session was held during the UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence 2015. People were encouraged to submit papers based around Genetic Programming and how genetic programming can be thought of as being inspired by natural evolution, genetic improvement programming can be thought of as being inspired by genetic modification. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.ukci2015.ex.ac.uk/special-sessions.php |
| Description | Genetically Improved Software Seminar, Brunel Software Engineering Laboratory, Brunel University |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Genetically Improved Software Seminar, Brunel Software Engineering Laboratory, Brunel University |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://www.brunel-sweng.org/?page_id=92 |
| Description | How computers are learning to make human software work more efficiently - article |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Article on The Conversation website J. R. Woodward, J. Petke, W. Langdon |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | https://theconversation.com/how-computers-are-learning-to-make-human-software-work-more-efficiently-... |
| Description | Huawei Workshop - Dr Earl Barr |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Automated Programming Workshop funded by Huawei on 11th Dec 2017 Professor Daniel Kröning : University of Oxford/DiffBlue Professor Earl Barr : UCL Professor Charles Sutton : University of Edinburgh Professor Hong Zhu : Oxford Brookes University Dr. Ian Bayley : Oxford Brookes University Professor Mark Harman : UCL/Facebook Professor Peter O'Hearn : UCL/Facebook Professor Alastair F. Donaldson : Imperial College London Professor Philippa Gardner : Imperial College London Dr. David White : UCL Dr. David Kelly (UCL) Dr. Zheng Gao (UCL) Mr. Laifa Zhang: President of RDCC (R&D Competence Center) Mr. Tony Chang: Chief Scientist, VP of RDCC in US Mr. Ni Huang (Eric) : Senior Director of RDCC Technology Planning Dept. Mr. Xuewen Gong (Sean) : Director of RDCC Technology Cooperation Dept. Professor Qianxiang Wang: Director of software analysis LAB of HUAWEI, vice chair of ACM CSOFT(China chapter of SIGSOFT), secretary-general of CCF TCSE(Technical Committee of Software Engineering, China Computer Federation). Mr. Michael Hill-King: Collaboration Director, Huawei Cambridge Research Centre. Mr. Duo Wu: Collaboration Manager, Huawei Cambridge Research Centre. Miss. Yuncong Zou: Collaboration Assistant, Huawei Cambridge Research Centre. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | ICST Tool Track 2015 program committee |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Yue Jia was on the program committee for the ICST Tool Track, 2015. This conference was attended by an international audience of peers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://icst2015.ist.tu-graz.ac.at/?page_id=150 |
| Description | International Summer School on Software Engineering 2014 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Federica Sarro was the Program co-chair at the eleventh edition of the International Summer School on Software Engineering. Which intends to provide a contribution to Ph.D. students and academic and industrial researchers on latest findings in the field of Software Engineering. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www.sesa.unisa.it/seschool/previousEditions/2014/ |
| Description | Mark Harman Keynote - CBSoft 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This keynote presented an overview of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE), giving examples of successful application across the full spectrum of software engineering activities and problems. It also covered recent results in genetic improvement. Starting from an existing version of a software system, genetic improvement uses SBSE to search the system's neighborhood, constructing new versions that are faithful to desirable semantics, while optimizing selected measurable properties of interest. This search-based approach to program improvement has been successfully applied to program transplantation, porting, and specialization, and to reducing the consumption of system resources such as time, memory and energy. This keynote is based on joint work with Earl Barr, Bobby Bruce, Yue Jia, Bill Langdon, |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://cbsoft.org/cbsoft2016 |
| Description | Mark Harman Keynote - MOBILESoft 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The talk presented results on analysis and testing of mobile apps and app stores, reviewing the work of the UCL App Analysis Group (UCLAppA) on App Store Mining and Analysis. It will also cover the work of the UCL CREST centre on Genetic Improvement, applicable to app improvement and optimisation for properties such as performance and energy consumption. This keynote was based on joint work with colleagues at UCL, including Afnan Alsubaihin, Bobby Bruce, Anthony Finkelstein, Yue Jia, Bill Langdon, Ke Mao, Alexandru Marginean, Justyna Petke, William Martin, Federica Sarro and Yuanyuan Zhang at UCL. UCLAppA website: http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/F.Sarro/projects/UCLappA/UCLappA.html |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://mobilesoftconf.org/2016/program/keynotes/ |
| Description | Microsoft Blog and video - Dr Sandy Brownlee |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Sandy Brownlee from The University of Stirling recently completed research into streamlining airports with cloud computing. This project used Microsoft Azure to process airport taxiing data. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/buckled-up-and-ready-to-go-untangling-airports-using-o... |
| Description | Program Commitee member ASE 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Yue Jia was on the Program Commitee for ASE 2015. This conference was attended by an international audience of peers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://ase2015.unl.edu/#tab-committee |
| Description | Program Committee for Mutation 2014 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Yue Jia was on the Program committee for Mutation 2014 in Cleveland USA. This event was attended by an international audience of peers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | https://sites.google.com/site/mutationworkshop2014/home/organisation |
| Description | Publicity chair at SSBSE 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Yuanyuan Zhang was the publicity chair at SSBSE 2015. This conference was attended by an international audience of peers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://ssbse.org/2015/index5c4e.html?page_id=32 |
| Description | Radio interview with Prof M Harman discussing Automated Software Transplantation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Prof Mark Harman appeared on the BBC World service program 'Click' on 5/8/15 discussing Automated Software Transplantation. This will have exposed the groups work to an international. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02y78pp |
| Description | Seminar - Genetically Improved Software |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "Genetically Improved Software" Dr. Bill Langdon (University College London) 17 February 2016 (Wednesday) 1 pm - 2 pm Hatfield, College Lane Campus Lecture Theatre LF233 Everyone is Welcome to Attend Refreshments will be available Abstract: Genetic Improvement (GI) uses modern search and optimisation techniques, principally Genetic Programming (GP), to optimise existing programs. I will start with a very brief introduction to GP, particularly its use in evolving optimisation benchmarks, hyper-heuristics, network protocols, composing web services, cache management strategies, specialising hashing and malloc, redundant programming and automatic bugfixing. There are many ways to balance requirements against resources (such as CPU, memory and energy consumption), but we cannot try them all. Also the easiest program to write (and maintain) may not be the most accurate or give the best trade-off between speed and quality. Then again the Pareto optimal tradeoff may be different on each hardware platform and it may change with time. Potentially GI could automatically customise apps for different users, even for different times of the day for the same user. Mostly I will concentrate on examples, such as were GI automatically customised existing programs to give considerable speed ups by evolving a new version of the program tailored to special cases. Reference: doi:10.1109/TEVC.2013.2281544 Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://homepages.herts.ac.uk/~comqcln//colloq/ |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://cs-colloq.cs.herts.ac.uk/langdon2016.txt |
| Description | Seminar Exeter University - Optimizing Existing Software With Genetic Programming |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Monday 29 Feb 2016: Optimizing Existing Software With Genetic Programming Bill Langdon - UCL H170 15:30-16:30 Genetic Improvement (GI) uses modern search based software engineering (SBSE) techniques such as Genetic Programming (GP), to optimise existing programs.? I plan to start with an introduction to genetic programming. Then give very brief descriptions of early GP work on evolving software from scratch and recent work on automatic bug fixing. Part of the motivation for GI is that customising software for different users, different hardware, different trade-offs between resources consumption (eg memory, speed, battery life) and quality, is at least as difficult and labour intensive as many other programming tasks and yet (we shall see) is at least partly automatable. Mostly I will concentrate on examples, such as given by the paper doi:10.1109/TEVC.2013.2281544 of the same name as the talk. Here GI automatically customised existing programs to give considerable speed ups with little lost in accuracy by evolving a new version of the program tailored to special cases. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://emps.exeter.ac.uk/computer-science/news/event/?semID=1783&dateID=4267 |
| Description | Short Papers and Graduate Student Tracks at SSBSE 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Federca Sarro was the Short Papers and Graduate Student Tracks at SSBSE 2015. This conference was attended by an international audience of peers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://ssbse.org/2015/index5c4e.html?page_id=32 |
| Description | Special Session at 2016 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence - Genetic Improvement of Software + Search-Based Software Engineering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | In the past ten years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to software engineering in which search-based optimisation algorithms are used to address problems. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semi-automated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. SBSE has been applied to a number of software engineering activities, right across the life-cycle from requirements engineering, project planning and cost estimation through testing, to automated maintenance, service-oriented software engineering, compiler optimisation and quality assessment. With this special session, we are providing an opportunity to showcase recent breakthroughs in this field. Scope and Topics We invite submissions on any aspect of SBSE, including, but not limited to, theoretical results and interesting new applications. The suggested topics cover the entire range of functional and non-functional properties: bandwidth minimisation latency minimisation fitness optimisation energy optimisation software specialisation memory optimisation software transplantation bug fixing multi-objective SE optimisation |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://www.wcci2016.org/programs.php?id=home |
| Description | Talk at UK Many-Core Developer Conference 2016 - |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | BarraCUDA is a Bioinformatics tool which looks up in a reference genome short noisy DNA sequences produced by the billion by next generation sequencing tools. It is a port of the BWA algorithm by six co-authors who included both experts on CUDA and experts in Bioinformatics, especially BWA and the BWT compression algorithm. BarraCUDA is open source CUDA code and is available from SourceForge. The existing code was improved by a combination of manual changes and automatic genetic evolution. The genetically improved code has been incorporated and has been available from SourceForge for a year. As with all implementations of BWT, speed depends upon the length of the DNA reads. For shorter reads a single lowly GT 730 (£50) can be faster than BWA. The GI version of BarraCUDA is up to three times faster than the earlier version of BarraCUDA. The new version has been adopted by Lab7 and IBM (including for Power8). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://conferences.inf.ed.ac.uk/UKMAC2016/ |
| Description | Talk at source{d} paper reading club - Madrid, 16 November 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Deep Learning for Programming Language Type Inference On Friday, November 16th, as part of source{d} paper reading club [1], we are going to talk about a paper that was recently published at FSE'18: Deep Learning Type Inference [2]. ABSTRACT Dynamically typed languages such as JavaScript and Python are increasingly popular, yet static typing has not been totally eclipsed: Python now supports type annotations and languages like TypeScript offer a middle-ground for JavaScript: a strict superset of JavaScript, to which it transpiles, coupled with a type system that permits partially typed programs. However, static typing has a cost: adding annotations, reading the added syntax, and wrestling with the type system to fix type errors. Type inference can ease the transition to more statically typed code and unlock the benefits of richer compile-time information, but is limited in languages like JavaScript as it cannot soundly handle duck-typing or runtime evaluation via eval. We propose DeepTyper, a deep learning model that understands which types naturally occur in certain contexts and relations and can provide type suggestions, which can often be verified by the type checker, even if it could not infer the type initially. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://github.com/src-d/reading-club |
| Description | Talk to Stirling Probus Club by Sandy Brownlee |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | An Overview of Artificial Intelligence - talk given to Stirling Probus Club, 25 October 2017 |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | The 22nd CREST Open Workshop - Engineering Optimization |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This workshop will investigate the ways in which optimisation has been, can be and should be used in engineering. It will cover optimisation algorithms in general and search based optimisation in particular. The workshop will consider all forms of engineering. It will seek to use optimisation theory, algorithms and practice as a lingua france to explore related problems and shared solutions approaches. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/22/ |
| Description | The 26th CREST Open Workshop - Dynamic Adaptive Automated Search Based Software Engineering (joint DAASE/COW workshop) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Current software development processes are expensive, laborious and error prone. They achieve adaptivity at only a glacial pace, largely through enormous human effort, forcing highly skilled engineers to waste significant time adapting many tedious implementation details. Often, the resulting software is equally inflexible, forcing users to also rely on their innate human adaptivity to find "workarounds". Yet software is one of the most inherently flexible engineering materials with which we have worked. Something is clearly wrong. This workshop will consider ways in which the theory, methods, practice and techniques associated with Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) can be used to enhance software adaptivity. The workshop is partly sponsored by the EPSRC programme grant DAASE: http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk/. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2008,2013 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/23/ |
| Description | The 28th CREST Open Workshop -Genetic Programming for Software Engineering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Genetic programming has found widespread application in engineering design, strategy formation, learning and modelling. More importantly for software engineering, recent advances in automated bug fixing, genetic improvement, program synthesis and genetic program translation have all demonstrated that GP can be used as a successful method to generate usable deployed software and its components. This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners for a two day workshop to discuss these and other exciting new opportunities for use of Genetic Programming for Software Engineering Optimisation. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012,2013 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/28/ |
| Description | The 31st CREST Open Workshop - Statistical Analysis for Software Engineering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Software Engineering increasingly involves statistical analysis. This CREST Open Workshop will be given over entirely to an extended tutorial by Barbara Kitchenham on the use of statistical techniques in Software Engineering. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/31/ |
| Description | The 33rd CREST Open Workshop - SSBSE "Jam Session" |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | this workshop will be a "jam session" in which the goal will be to establish collaborations and joint work leading to submissions to the 6th Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering (SSBSE) challenge track call: http://ssbse.org/2014/sbse-challenge/. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/33/ |
| Description | The 34th CREST Open Workshop - CREST Annual Review |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This workshop will present a review of recent research undertaken in CREST. Each post-doctoral researcher and PhD student in CREST will present a short (20 minute) talk, highlighting recent research results. There will be plenty of time for discussion, as with all of our COWs. Though all talks at this workshop will be given by members of the CREST centre, we very much welcome members of the research community outside CREST to register and attend the workshop. We always welcome feedback on our work. This workshop will also provide an opportunity to explore possible collaborations, both within CREST and also between CREST and others who attend the workshop. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/34/ |
| Description | The 35th CREST Open Workshop - Tutorial on writing EPSRC ICT proposals |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Speaker: Professor John A Clark MA (Maths), MSc (Applied Statistics), PhD (Computer Science) Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award Holder John Clark is Professor of Critical Systems at Department of Computer Science at the University of York and also Deputy Head of Department (responsible for Research). His research is principally concerned with the application of AI to solving problems in software engineering and security. He has also researched across disciplines with work in quantum algorithm synthesis, NMR spectroscopy and medieval scribal handwriting identification. He has been co-author of ten best paper prizes in the past ten years and recipient of two cash prizes for human competitive achievements via evolutionary computation. He has reviewed over 70 EPSRC proposals and has sat on panels for standard response mode grants, fellowships, and Centres for Doctoral Training. His research has been funded variously by the EPSRC, EU, UK Government agencies, and commerce. Prior to joining York he worked under contract to HMG on security-related research, development and evaluation. Overview: This tutorial will be a two day interactive workshop on grant writing with a focus on the writing grants for the ICT programme of the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC). The tutorial will cover the submission and review process, common pitfalls, advice on best practice and suggestions for how to approach costing, presentation and making the case for your research. This event is available at no cost to attendees though there will be a cancellation fee of £100 for those who register but subsequently fail to attend. It should be noted that the tutorial content is based on the experience of the proposers (John Clark and Mark Harman), as a way to share advice and experience and does not necessarily represent the views of the EPSRC. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/35/ |
| Description | The 36th CREST Open Workshop - App Store Analysis |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | App stores provide a rich source of information for software engineering research: It is, of course, possible to extract technical information as with other software systems. However, we can also readily obtain information relating to customer reviews, pricing and popularity. Never before in history of software engineering has so much information been available concerning so many, and so disparate, facets of software systems. Increasingly, the users of apps and app stores are relying on the software they provide for highly nontrivial activities, making app store analysis a pressing concern. This workshop will bring together software engineers to discuss and develop the emerging research agenda in App Store Analysis. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/36/ |
| Description | The 37th CREST Open Workshop - Working Tutorial on Empirical Software Engineering Methods |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Speaker: Per Runeson, Department of Computer Science, Lund University, Sweden Dr Per Runeson is a professor of software engineering at Lund University, Sweden, and is head of its Computer Science department. He is also leader of its Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) and the Industrial Excellence Center on Embedded Applications Software Engineering (EASE). His research interests include empirical research on software development and management methods, in particular for verification and validation. He is the principal author of "Case study research in software engineering", has coauthored "Experimentation in software engineering", serves on the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering and Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, and is a member of several program committees. Overview: This tutorial will cover empirical software engineering methods in overview and then focus in detail on procedures and practices for conducting Software Engineering case studies and formal experiments, comparing and contrasting the two. The tutorial will be interactive and participatory and will be particularly useful to researchers working on empirical software engineering. It will be given by Professor Per Runeson from Lund University, Sweden, who is a widely-recognised and internationally leading expert on empirical software engineering in general, and case studies and formal experiments in particular. Prof Runeson has published over 100 papers on these topics, which have attracted more than 6,500 citations. He is the co-author of many widely known articles and books on empirical software engineering, such as his seminal text book "experimentation in software engineering", published by Kluwer in 2000 and republished by Springer in 2012. He is also an author of "Case Study Research in Software Engineering -- Guidelines and Example", published by Wiley in 2012. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/37/ |
| Description | The 38th CREST Open Workshop - Working Tutorial on Statistical Methods in Experimental Software Engineering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Speaker: Dr Simon Poulding Dr. Poulding is a postdoctoral researcher at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. He has widely published on software engineering in general and search based software engineering in particular and his work is marked out for its exemplary use of inferential statistical techniques for data analysis. His work has appeared in the leading journals and conferences in the area, and he has received several best paper awards. Overview: Software Engineering increasingly involves statistical analysis. This CREST Open Workshop will be given over entirely to an extended tutorial by Simon Poulding on the use of statistical techniques in Software Engineering. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/38/ |
| Description | The 40th CREST Open Workshop - SSBSE 2015 Challenge: Collaborative Jam Session |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The 7th Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering (http://ssbse.org/2015/) is hosting a Challenge Track, in which authors are invited to submit six-page papers describing the application of SBSE techniques to one of three real-world example programs, listed in the challenge call. The purpose of this CREST open workshop is to draw together those in the community interested in collaborating on submissions for this challenge. The workshop will act, in part, as a `collaboration brokerage', helping to facilitate and foster collaborations between different subgroups attending the workshop. Members of the EPSRC Dynamic Adaptive Automated Software Engineering (DAASE: http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk) project will be participating in the workshop, thereby providing opportunities for others in the community to develop or initiate collaboration with the DAASE project members and/or with each other. The emphasis of the workshop will be on collaboration with a view to producing high quality submissions to the challenge track. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/40/ |
| Description | The 42nd CREST Open Workshop - CREST Annual Research Review: Recent Results and Research Trends |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This workshop will be an annual review of work undertaken by research staff, students and faculty in the Centre for Research on Evolution Search and Testing (CREST). We will present and discuss recently published research. We welcome participation from others outside CREST, who might wish to use the workshop as an opportunity to find out more about our research, and possibly also to start collaboration with the Centre. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/42/ |
| Description | The 43rd CREST Open Workshop - Hyper-Heuristics for Software Engineering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) has proved extremely attractive to software engineers, because it handles messy conflicting multi-objective problems and copes well with noise and with partial and contradictory information. Although SBSE has proved very widely applicable and generalisable, many software engineers now find themselves bewildered by the enormous variety of potential computational search algorithms available to them. For many software engineering problems, generalist algorithms that perform acceptably well (across a wide range of problem instances) would be considerably preferable to a set of specific algorithms, each of which has to be carefully selected and tuned to the particular problem in hand, even if such careful tuning could outperform the generalist. Hyper-heuristics offer such a generalist solution, able to learn and adapt to the problem in hand, and therefore they have become increasingly attractive to software engineers. This workshop will bring together researchers working on hyper-heuristics and SBSE, seeking to stimulate wider and deeper collaboration, and to map out an agenda for Hyper-Heuristic Software Engineering. Funding for the workshop is provided by the EPSRC project DAASE (http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/43/ |
| Description | The 44th CREST Open Workshop - Predictive Modelling for Software Engineering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Predictive modelling is very important in software engineering, and has been used, inter alia, to predict project costs, and the faultiness (or otherwise) of software components. Adaptivity is also important to allow software systems to maintain performance and service levels within dynamically changing environments. This workshop will bring together researchers working on search based optimisation (SBSE) for dynamic adaptivity with researchers working on predictive modelling. This will allow us to explore the possible applications of predictive modelling to support enhanced software and activity. Funding for the workshop is provided by the EPSRC project DAASE (http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/44/ |
| Description | The 46th CREST Open Workshop - SSBSE 2016 Challenge: Collaborative Jam Session |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The 8th Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering (http://ssbse.org/2016/) is hosting a Challenge Track, in which authors are invited to submit six-page papers describing the application of SBSE techniques to one of four real-world example programs, listed in the challenge call. The purpose of this CREST open workshop is to draw together those in the community interested in collaborating on submissions for this challenge. The workshop will act, in part, as a `collaboration brokerage', helping to facilitate and foster collaborations between different subgroups attending the workshop. The workshop is open to everyone, both from academia and industry. Members of the EPSRC Dynamic Adaptive Automated Software Engineering (DAASE: http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk) project will be participating in the workshop, thereby providing opportunities for others in the community to develop or initiate collaboration with the DAASE project members and/or with each other. The emphasis of the workshop will be on collaboration with a view to producing high quality submissions to the challenge track. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/46/ |
| Description | The 47th CREST Open Workshop - CREST 10th Anniversary |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This workshop will present recent work by members of CREST and their collaborators, focusing on those items of work that have attracted early intellectual impact, awards or other notoriety, as a showcase of the work of the centre. The list of talks, their publication venues and some of the relevant awards that motivated their inclusion in the workshop are listed below. As usual the workshop will focus on discussion, allowing plenty of time to question and discuss this work and to engender further collaboration. This CREST open workshop, the 47th in the series, which began in 2009, is a special open workshop, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the centre, which was founded on the 28th June 2006. All are very welcome to come and join us. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/47/ |
| Description | The 48th CREST Open Workshop - Tutorial on Causal Impact |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | "Correlation is not causation" is a widely-observed scientific maxim. Unfortunately, this observation is highly correlated with hypersensitive scientific cautiousness; it may even have caused it in some cases. We are naturally reticent to speculate about cause, but in order to more deeply understand many phenomena, including those of importance to software engineers, we need techniques that allow us to talk about causes. This CREST Open Workshop will be a tutorial on Causal Impact Analysis, featuring a one-day foundational tutorial from Kay Brodersen (Google Inc. and ETH), who introduced time series models of causal impact, followed by a shorter quarter-day tutorial by William Martin (CREST UCL) on applications of Brodersen's approach to Windows Phone Store. The two tutorials will be followed by an open discussion on applications of causal impact analysis to software engineering problems. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/48/ |
| Description | The 49th CREST Open Workshop - Software Architecture and Technical Debt |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | It has been widely observed that software engineers often implement 'not quite right' solutions to gain value in form of fast delivery and prototyping. Moreover, it is believed that engineers resist attempts to change systems to avoid disruption and other costs this might incur, thereby building up a set of delayed interventions known as technical debt. This poses significant challenges to research and practice, including measuring and understanding technical debt, managing and ameliorating its effects, and providing automated and semi automated support to software engineers. This workshop will focus on software architecture and design, and the role it has to play in addressing these issues of technical debt. It will draw together experts in software architecture, measuring and understanding technical debt, and the provision of automated and semi automated support. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/49/ |
| Description | The 50th CREST Open Workshop - Genetic Improvement |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Genetic Improvement (GI) uses automated search to find improved versions of existing software. GI has been used to improve many system aspects such as its correctness (through bug fixing) and resource consumption such as time, memory and energy. It has also been used for other kinds of improvement such as specialising and porting. Many and varied techniques have proved successful at improving programs, such as loop perforation, genetic programming, guided random search, transplantation and constraint-based synthesis. This workshop will bring together researchers working on search based software engineering, program synthesis, genetic programming, program analysis, data mining and machine learning. We will explore the possible applications and connections between the various fields that will hopefully lead to development of new GI techniques for automated software improvement. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/50/ |
| Description | The 51st CREST Open Workshop - Tutorial on Landscape Analysis |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Understanding the nature of the underlying structure of the search landscape is important for Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE). The purpose of this pair of distinguished tutorials is to help the Software Engineering community to raise its appreciation and potential application of landscape analysis to problems in SBSE. We are delighted to have two absolutely outstanding speakers, of high international renown, who have graciously agreed to each give a full day tutorial on the subject. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/51/ |
| Description | The 52nd CREST Open Workshop - Predictive Models in Software Engineering: Measures, Models and Benchmarks |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Predictive modelling is the practice of exploiting information from past event in order to determine patterns and predict future outcomes and trends with an acceptable level of reliability. Applied to Software Engineering (SE), predictive modelling is used to estimate software project cost, risk, and quality, but also to analyse historical data in order to better understand software processes, products, and customers. This workshop will bring together world leading researchers and practitioners interested in measures, models, and benchmarks for predictive systems to discuss the latest achievements in various SE tasks and to explore enhanced applications of predictive modelling for adaptive software products and processes. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/52/ |
| Description | The 53rd CREST Open Workshop - SSBSE 2017 Challenge: Collaborative Jam Session |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The 9th Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering (http://ssbse17.github.io/challenge/) is hosting a Challenge Track, in which authors are invited to submit six-page papers describing the application of SBSE techniques to one of four real-world example programs (LibreOffice, SQLite, Guava and Flask). The purpose of this CREST open workshop is to draw together those in the community interested in collaborating on submissions for this challenge. The workshop will act, in part, as a `collaboration brokerage', helping to facilitate and foster collaborations between different subgroups attending the workshop. A wiki with links to artefacts and guidelines for all the challenge systems can be found at https://github.com/mhepaixao/ssbse17_challenge_wiki. Feel free to take a look at what the systems have to offer before the event, and get ready to work at those during the workshop. The workshop is open to everyone, both from academia and industry. Members of the EPSRC Dynamic Adaptive Automated Software Engineering (DAASE: http://daase.cs.ucl.ac.uk) project will be participating in the workshop, thereby providing opportunities for others in the community to develop or initiate collaboration with the DAASE project members and/or with each other. The emphasis of the workshop will be on collaboration with a view to producing high quality submissions to the challenge track. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/53/ |
| Description | The 54th CREST Open Workshop - The Best of CREST 2016-2017 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This one day workshop will present recent research by members of CREST as a showcase of the work from the centre in 2016-2017. As usual, the workshop will focus on discussion, allowing plenty of time for questions. We welcome participation from others outside CREST, who might wish to use the workshop as an opportunity to find out more about our research. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/54/ |
| Description | The 55th CREST Open Workshop - Bimodal Program Analysis |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Overview: Software is bimodal: it interlinks two channels, an algorithmic channel aimed at devices and a natural language channel aimed at developers. Most research has focused on one channel or the other, not their interplay. Simultaneously considering both channels promises a new source of constraints for improving program analysis and software engineering tools. For example, names in program text can be exploited to refine a type lattice. The CREST Open Workshop on PL and NLP will explore how to identify and exploit these cross-channel connections. Organisers: Earl Barr, CREST Centre, SSE Group, Department of Computer Science, UCL, UK Santanu Dash, CREST Centre, SSE Group, Department of Computer Science, UCL, UK |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/55/ |
| Description | The 56th CREST Open Workshop - Code Review and Continuous Inspection/Integration |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Code Review has become a widely accepted approach to continuously ensure the quality of software undergoing changes. It is used both in industry and open source software development and has transformed over the past decade to a change-focused process that is deeply integrated with continuous integration and inspection. While continuous integration and inspection is a fully automated process to ensure quality, code review relies on humans. New approaches feed the results of static and dynamic analysis during continuous integration to reviewers in order to support them in their reviewing task. Moreover, the additional information available through code review repositories has enabled researchers to study day-to-day software development, for example, by studying the motivation and discussions on proposed changes. This workshop will bring together world leading researchers and practitioners interested in code review and continuous inspection/integration. The aim is to discuss the latest achievements in analysing and understanding commits and code reviews, and how commit and code review repositories help to analyse general software engineering problems. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/56/ |
| Description | The 58th CREST Open Workshop - Automating Programmers' Programming Experiments for Analytic Result Reporting in Code Review and Continuous Integration |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This workshop seeks to bring together researchers working on Automated Repair, Empirical Software Engineering, Genetic Improvement, Program Analysis & Synthesis, and Software Testing & Transplantation explore the possibility that automated scientific experimentation could and should be part of automated program improvement: Whereas human engineers are too time-constrained to perform extensive systematic experimentation that documents and justifies their code changes, the machine is comparatively unconstrained. Advances in automated program improvement suggest an exciting future in which automated techniques combine with human insights and domain expertise to collaborate on the challenge of improving software systems. In this workshop we address the research question: How can we best combine and exploit the machines' ability to automatically navigate large improvement search spaces with human insight, decision making and domain expertise? Much of the tech sector deploys through continuous integration, underpinned by modern code review, thereby providing a readily re-targetable infrastructure for machine-human collaboration on code change. The workshop seeks to accelerate industrial deployment by exploring the requirements for code improvement techniques that automatically provide systematic, well-documented, empirical evidence to the human code reviewer that supports the suggested program improvements they have found. http://geneticimprovementofsoftware.com/ |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/58/ |
| Description | The 59th CREST Open Workshop - Multi-Language Software Analysis |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Software analysis tools typically focus on a single programming language but modern software systems are typically comprised of elements written in many different programming languages. As such, techniques that can address multiple programming languages are ever more important and can provide software engineers with better ways to undertake software development, maintenance, and evolution. Researchers also benefit from being able to study software systems in their entirety rather than being restricted to those facets for which tools and techniques are available. This workshop will bring together world-leading researchers and practitioners interested in multi/mixed language software analysis to discuss the latest achievements in supporting, analysing, and understanding multi-language analysis and how this can help support software engineering processes. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/59/ |
| Description | The 60th CREST Open Workshop - Those were the DAASE |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Overview: DAASE has advanced the state of the art in numerous directions: novel, principled technique for handling class imbalance, optimising energy consumption, automated program repair, automatically generating product roadmaps, to name a few. DAASE has achieved breakthroughs, including automated software transplantation, the first approach for transplanting code that dynamically adapts it for a new context, and a human-competitive multi-objective software effort estimator that balances accuracy against variance, both of which won Hummies at GECCO. DAASE has pioneered a new field of research called genetic improvement and produced award-winning work on fitness landscape analysis and visualisation. DAASE has spawned a number of start-ups, most notably Sapienz which Facebook acquired and which now tests and automatically repairs code at Internet scale. Heathrow's plane scheduling now relies on a bespoke optimisation algorithm devised by DAASE researchers. Automated software repair using genetic improvement is also now a part of Janus Manager, a management software for rehabilitation centres in Iceland. Join us to review and celebrate these accomplishments, and discuss how to carry them forward. Day 1 - Monday 3 Dec 10:45 - Pastries 11:15 - Introductions - Earl Barr 11:30 - Bill Langdon, CREST Centre, SSE Group, Department of Computer Science, UCL, UK Genetic Improvement by Evolving Program Data 12:00 - Darrell Whitley, Colorado State University, USA Optimal Neuron Selection and Ensemble Based Learning 12:30 - Lunch 13:30 - Mark Harman, CREST Centre, SSE Group, Department of Computer Science, UCL, UK and Facebook Deploying Search Based Software Engineering with Sapienz at Facebook 14:00 - John Woodward, School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, UK Genetic Improvement in a Live System 14:30 - Earl Barr, CREST Centre, SSE Group, Department of Computer Science, UCL, UK Bimodal software engineering 15:00 - Refreshments 15:30 - John Clark, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK Pushing the searchboat out: from quantum software simulation to digital twinning 16:00 - Jeff Kramer, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK The challenge of change 16:30 - Close of day Day 2 - Tuesday 4 Dec 11:00 - Pastries 11:30 - Justyna Petke, CREST Centre, SSE Group, Department of Computer Science, UCL, UK Specialising Software Using Genetic Improvement and Code Transplantation 12:00 - Leandro Minku, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK A Novel Automated Approach for Software Effort Estimation Based on Data Augmentation 12:30 - Lunch 13:30 - Gabriela Ochoa, Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling, UK LON Maps: Recent Advances in Local Optima Networks 14:00 - Erwin Pesch, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University in Siegen, Germany Preventing Crane Interferences at Automated Container Terminals 14:30 - David R. White, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK Gin: a Tool for Program Improvement 15:00 - Refreshments 15:30 - Closing remarks 16:00 - Close of day |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/cow/60/ |
| Description | Tutorial in Hyper-Heuristics. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This tutorial will placed hyper-heuristics in the context of genetic programming - which differs in that it constructs solutions from scratch using atomic primitives - as well as genetic improvement - which takes a program as starting point and improves on it (a recent direction introduced by William Langdon). John Woodward held this tutorial. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2015/tutorials.html#hh |
| Description | Tutorial in Semi-Automated Algorithm Design with Genetic Programming, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2015) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This tutorial gives a methodology for the use of constructive, generative hyper-heuristics to improve human-designed algorithms. This methodology has been successfully used by the presenters in a variety of application areas. It employs Genetic Programming, resulting in a semi-automated design process. The tutorial provided a simple step-by-step guide, introducing researchers to an exciting topic with many potential applications. John Woodward held this tutorial. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://sites.ieee.org/cec2015/tutorials/ |
| Description | Visit to Luxembourg University |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | 8 + 9 of April 2019 Research visit to Jacques Klein at Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://wwwen.uni.lu/research/fstc/computer_science_and_communications_research_unit/members/jacques... |
| Description | Weighing up the options: finding the right solution when lots of things matter - Talk at University of Stirling by Dr Sandy Brownlee |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | We can all think of a machine or a process that we'd like to be faster, cheaper, greener or otherwise better. Optimisation is the process of tuning something so that some aspect of it is made as big or small as possible. But what do we do when more than one thing is important? For example, we can make a car fast, comfortable or cheap, but probably not all together. There are many designs that strike different balances between these goals. Finding this trade-off between goals or "objectives" is known as multi-objective optimisation (MOO). This talk will introduce MOO and how it can be done automatically by computers intelligently searching through vast numbers of possibilities. I'll give examples based on my research in optimising buildings to be cheap to build, comfortable and energy-efficient, and show how MOO can be a huge help to designers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://www.stir.ac.uk/events/2016/march/arandomwalkthroughmathematicsandcomputingscience-weighingupt... |
| Description | Why we fell out of love with algorithms inspired by nature - article |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Article on The Conversation website A. E. I. Brownlee, J. R. Woodward |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | https://theconversation.com/why-we-fell-out-of-love-with-algorithms-inspired-by-nature-42718 |
| Description | Women@GECCO workshop 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Women form an under-represented cohort in evolutionary computation, whether the cohort is examined in industry, academics or both. The broad objective of this workshop is bring women attending GECCO together to share ways that will generate, encourage and support academic, professional and social opportunities for women in evolutionary computation. The workshop will foster, sustain and impart role models and offer the opportunity to interact with others "in the same boat". We encourage all faculty, professional and students interested in Evolutionary Computation who identify as female, who consider themselves underrepresented minorities with similar issues, or are male and supportive of the issues to attend. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2015/workshops.html#wag |
| Description | Workshop on Genetic Improvement at GECCO 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Workshop given by Dr J Petke, Dr W Langdon and Dr D. R White Summary: Lately there has been enormous interest in the use of evolutionary and genetic search in optimising aspects of software engineering. For example, since 2002 there has been an SBSE track at GECCO. More recently there is a dedicated SSBSE conference. Indeed we now see regional conferences and workshops featuring or even dedicated to Search Based Software Engineering starting (in China, Brazil and now the USA). Including to appear, since 2000, there have been more than 70 papers in this area and interest is growing. Since 2009 there have been three human competitive awards (Gold, Silver and Bronze) presented at GECCO and two best papers, including the International Conference on Software Engineering and GECCO. Whilst SBSE has traditionally been applied to software engineering problems there has been great interest in using it, particularly genetic programming, on software itself. Genetic Improvement (GI) is the application of evolutionary and search-based optimisation methods to the improvement of existing software. The technique was first applied to optimise and find compromises between non-functional properties of software, such as execution time and power consumption. This work lead on to automated bug fixing in commercial software. More recently, it has been shown that GP can use human written software as a feed stock for GP and is able to evolve mutant software dedicated to solving particular problems. Another interesting area is grow and graft GP, where software is incubated outside its target human written code and subsequently grafted into it via GP. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2015/workshops.html#gi |
| Description | XIVth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | PPSN 2016, the 14th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN XIV). This biennial event constitutes one of the most important and highly regarded international conferences in nature-inspired computation, ranging from evolutionary computation and robotics to artificial life and metaheuristics. Continuing with a tradition that started in Dortmund in 1990, PPSN XIV was held during September 17-21, 2016, in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, organised by Edinburgh Napier University. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://www.ppsn2016.org/conference/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/PPSN-Conference-Booklet.pdf |