Software Engineering RDI Unit

A significant digital transformation is underway, disrupting all organizational activities and processes. Software is the infrastructure that powers this transformation, making the ability to produce high quality software a strategic economic capability. It is thus essential to build better software faster. We must be able to develop secure, reliable and trustworthy complex systems (including Digital Twins and their associated data spaces)  in a shorter time to market, even by non-technical experts.  And, more often than not, such software systems need to be intelligent and have AI-based components embedded (for example, to communicate with users using voice or text, or to predict future user behaviours based on the analysis of historical data).

The key goal of this unit is then to provide a set of methods, platforms and services to help companies carry out their digital transformation by empowering them to build better software faster.

Research challenges

To achieve this overarching objective,  we target a number of research challenges. Among others:

• What are the best languages to gather requirements and model such complex smart systems?
• What types of formal techniques can be used to test, validate, generate, evolve and deploy these systems?
• How to integrate the power of Generative AI to produce intelligent systems?
• How to make sure AI components embedded in our systems behave in an ethical way?

Research groups

The unit is composed of around 10 scientists, engineers, post-docs and PhD candidates with complementary scientific and technological expertise, covering the following topics and expertise: software engineering, low-code/no-code approaches, chatbot development and generative AI.