Software Engineering Intelligence

The recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are dramatically impacting the way we are designing and evolving software systems. Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) is a new paradigm to address the growing need to combine different types of AI algorithms ranging from metaheuristics search to machine learning, NLP, and deep learning for various Software Engineering problems covering the software life-cycle. This new field is motivated by the urgent needs to reduce designers/developers interaction, build intelligent assistants/bots for programmers, provide explanations, support scalable solutions and extract relevant knowledge to understand the designer/developer preferences. However, the combination of carefully designed intelligent methods is challenging due to their different assumptions, computational complexity, and randomness.

This talk will introduce Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI); foundations, recent advances and directions for future work. The talk will provide an overview of recent results in building bots for code reviews and refactoring by combining various intelligent methods validated on both industrial and open source projects. I will present a live demo of our bots, implemented as Gitapps, to provide software developers an artificial assistant interacting with them in an intelligent and proactive way, being aware of the specifics of software development, and becoming an active member of the development team.The talk will also set an agenda for future SEI work.

 Dr. Marouane Kessentini is currently a tenured associate professor at UM-Dearborn, director of the Dearborn Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) Center (dair.umdearborn.edu) and leading a research group on Software Engineering Intelligence. He is a recipient of the prestigious 2018 President of Tunisia distinguished research award, the UM-Dearborn distinguished teaching award, the UM-Dearborn distinguished digital education award, the UM-Dearborn College of Engineering and Computer Science distinguished research award, 4 best paper awards, and his AI-based software refactoring inventions are licensed and deployed by industrial partners. Prior to joining UM-Dearborn in 2013, He received his Ph.D. from the University of Montreal in Canada in 2012. He received several grants from both industry and federal agencies and published over 130 papers in top journals and conferences. He is the co-founder of IWoR and NasBASE, General Chair of SSBSE’16 and ASE’21, and PC chair of SANER2021, MODELS19 and GECCO14-15 (SBSE Track).