Software Engineering

Software is ubiquitous, powering almost every aspect of our lives. The increasing digital transformation of society means that demand for ever more complex will increase exponentially in the foreseeable future.

Objectives

The main goal of the Software Engineering group is to help organizations build and maintain better software faster, using a combination of formal methods, low-code, AI and open-source techniques.

To clarify, “better” can be understood as software with fewer bugs, while “faster” indicates the desire to accelerate the productivity of software developers, even empowering citizen developers.

More specifically, the main research topics covered by the group focus on:

• Low-code / no-code development
• Software engineering for AI
• AI for software engineering
• Software evolution and maintenance (e.g. Digital Twins)
• Bot / agent development
• LLM testing (e.g., education, linguistic capabilities, biases)

Scope of expertise

Performing high-quality research on these topics, the group is recognized for its deep expertise in modelling complex systems. This can include the creation of domain-specific languages to optimize such activities.  Since complex systems require embedded AI components, the group also develops innovative techniques to model and test these components as an integral part of the overall software system. The group’s AI testing goes beyond purely functional aspects to also address social dimensions such as biases, linguistic capabilities, and robustness.