Southern California Software Engineering Symposium (SuCSES) Connects Industry with University Researchers

ISR helds its second annual Southern California Software Engineering Symposium (SuCSES) on January 24. The goal of this event is to bring together researchers, leaders in industry, and technical practitioners to Southern California to discuss trends in the field of software engineering, showcase current research, formulate visions on strategic future research and technological directions, and build community.

SuCSES 2020 featured two exciting keynote speakers. The event opened with Dr. Evelyn Duesterwald, Principal Research Staff Member and Manager, AI Lifecycle Acceleration at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. In Duestwerwald’s keynote presentation, titled “Engineering the End-to-End AI Lifecycle,” she discussed the end-to-end lifecycle for machine learning models and ways to operationalize it using reusable components. The afternoon keynote talk was given by Dr. Daniel M. Russell, Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google. His talk, titled “The Joy of Search: Adventures in teaching online research skills (and why that’s important for software engineering),” included a discussion of his experience teaching a massive open online course (MOOC) which has had over 4 million students.

One goal of SuCSES is to building community among software engineering researchers. To this end, the program included talks by faculty from three universities in addition to those from UCI. The speakers were: professor Chao Wang from USC; professor Yu Sun from Cal Poly Pomona; professor Na Meng from Virginia Tech; and professors Joshua Garcia, James A. Jones, and David Redmiles from UCI ISR. A poster and demo session held at lunch featured 18 projects, presented by students from UCI as well as USC. This always popular session, held over lunch, provided a great opportunity for attendees to meet graduate students, interact one-on-one with researchers, and learn about research projects firsthand.

A new opportunity was added this year: a career-oriented mixer at the end of the day enabled industry participants to meet students looking for jobs and internships—in particular, students from the professional Master of Software Engineering (MSWE) program, who are required to have a summer internship.

SuCSES 2020 attracted over 160 attendees from 20 companies, and 11 regional, national, and international universities—making it a true success! Attendees commented enthusiastically on the applicability of the keyote talks to their work, the germane research addressed in the faculty talks, and the prospects for meeting graduate students at the poster/demo session, the career-orinted mixer, and throughout the day.

“I have been attending SuCSES and the previous ISR Research Forum every year since I graduated,” said alumnus Arthur Valadares (Ph.D. 2016; C. Lopes advisor), Staff Software Engineer, Rockley Photonics. “I work at a start-up where I am responsible for most software engineering decisions, where little existing software infrastructure exists. The symposium presentations and posters provide an opportunity to follow research trends that help me navigate best practices for industry. At this year’s symposium, I also had the opportunity to recruit a promising student from the new professional Master of Software Engineering (MSWE) program for a summer internship. I certainly look forward to attending next year as well.”

For additional information, visit the SuCSES 2020 website.

Videos of the talks are available on the SuCSES 2020 website and the ISRUCI YouTube channel.

You can read more about SuCSES 2020 in this article by ICS senior writer Shani Murray.