ISR's mission is to advance knowledge surrounding software and socio-technical systems by fostering innovative basic and applied research.  

ISR is dedicated to:

• fostering innovative basic and applied research in software and socio-technical systems;
• working with established companies, start-ups, government agencies, and standards bodies to develop and transition the technologies to widespread and practical application;
• educating the next generation of researchers and practitioners; and
• supporting the public service mission of the University of California in developing the economic basis of the State of California.  

Research emphases of the Institute include software architecture; collaboration; software security; open source software (OSS) development; empirical software engineering; large systems and large data; simulation; analysis; testing, debugging and maintenance; computer games and virtual worlds; privacy and personalization; end-user development; computer-supported cooperative work; human-computer interaction, and more.

ISR researchers are engaged in a wide variety of sponsored research projects. Many are funded by the National Science Foundation. Other sponsors and supporters have included DARPA, DHS, FBI,  Google, IBM Research, Northrop Grumman, NTT, San Francisco Symphony, The Aerospace Corporation, and the U.S. Navy, to name but a few. 

ISR has supported the research community through conference management services.  ISR staff have supported conferences such as the 11th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2016), iConference 2015, the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011), the 26th Annual ACM Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH 2011),  and the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2008), among many others. ISR faculty, staff, and graduate students played key roles in these conferences. 

Regular meetings on campus support a vibrant community. These meetings include a long-running annual Distinguished Speaker Series. This highly successful series typically features three internationally renowned speakers. A new Southern California Software Engineering Symposium (SuCSES), is a follow-on to the very popular annual Research Forum. SuCSES features talks by software engineering faculty from regional universities as well as ISR faculty, a posters and demonstrations session, and invited keynote speakers.

ISR is consistently involved in external activities as well. For example, The Aerospace Corporation’s Ground Systems Architecture Workshop (GSAW) was held in cooperation with ISR from 2003 to 2018.

ISR is an affiliate of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology - Calit2.