The Changing Landscape of Software Engineering Research and Practice

This talk will cover work on Software Engineering automation in academia and in industry. The roles of human engineer and machine are rapidly changing, with advances in AI opening radical new opportunities for the development of software systems. With these new opportunities come profound scientific questions and challenges. This talk will explore some of these challenges in the context of software performance, safety and reliability.

Speaker

Professor Mark Harman is a full-time Software Engineer at Meta Platforms where he is working on Software Engineering Automation. He co-founded the Simulation Based Testing team, which developed and deployed the Sapienz and WW platforms for client- and server- side testing. Simulation-based testing is helping to tackle challenging technical problems in software reliability, performance, safety and privacy. These simulation-based testing technologies have been deployed to test systems of 100s of millions of lines of lines of code, daily relied upon by over 2.88 billion people for communications, business, social media and community building.

Sapienz grew out of Majicke (a start up Mark co-founded) that was acquired by Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2017. Prior to working at Meta Platforms, Mark was head of Software Engineering and director of its CREST centre at UCL, where he remains a part time professor. Prior to this, from 2004 to 2010, he was Professor of Software Engineering at King's College London, where he co-founded the CREST centre in 2006.

In his more purely scientific work, he co-founded the field Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) in 2001, now the subject of active research in over 40 countries worldwide. He received the IEEE Harlan Mills Award and the ACM Outstanding Research Award in 2019 for his work, and was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2020.