Walid Maalej on Software Engineering

Prof. Walid Maalej, from Universität Hamburg, offered two excellent presentations at the CCSL. He also took the time to discuss the research projects of some of our graduate students working on topics related to Software Engineering.

AI Engineering - How can Software & Requirements Engineering Help Solving the “AI Dilemma”

Oct 2nd, 14:00h

Abstract: AI and Software Engineering have co-evolved and profited from each other since their beginnings. During the last decade, Software Engineering has particularly profited from advances in Machine Learning and in Natural language Processing. By now, recommender systems, prediction models, and bots have become standard tools to support software engineering tasks: from requirements elicitation and documentation, to code generation and quality assurance.

The current decade will however be focusing on the opposite direction, i.e. how can AI profit from Software Engineering. This lecture will show how recent challenges faced by the Machine Learning, NLP, as well as the Data Science communities are primarily engineering challenges. The lecture lays out how traditional as well as modern Software and Requirements Engineering can help address these challenges: in order to increase the applicability, acceptance, and reliability of AI-based systems in practice.

Modern Requirements Engineering: issue trackers for RE and user feedback in RE

Oct 3rd, 10:00h

Bio: Walid Maalej is an award-winning software & requirements researcher, passionate educator, and handicraft enthusiast. As Professor of Informatics at the University of Hamburg, he teaches software development basics to up to 700 students in a single course, using fun activities and pair-programming. His advanced software engineering courses address real challenges from industry and society by combining cutting-edge technology with a large portion of empiricism and communication skills. As head of informatics department, he successfully navigated the department through turbulent pandemic times including an exceptional budget cut.

Prof. Maalej’s research interests include AI engineering, user involvement and feedback mining, sustainability in software, as well as knowledge creation and sharing in software projects. His work on these topics has been cited thousands of times and received a.o. the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, IEEE RE Best Paper Award, MSR Most Influential Paper Award, as well as awards by Google and Microsoft. In 2014 Prof. Maalej was named “The Early Stage Scientist of the Year” by academics and the German Association of University Professors (DHV) across all disciplines. He currently serves as Steering Committee Chair of the Requirements Engineering conference series. Prof. Maalej has worked as developer and consultant with and for multiple companies and organizations including Siemens, Tata Consultancy Services, Rohde und Schwarz, and Telekom. He received his doctoral degree in informatics from TU Munich with distinction and is also a proud alumni of the Center for Digital Technology and Management.