From July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2018, ISR was pleased to host visiting researcher Dr. Shinobu Saito, Senior Research Engineer at the NTT Software Innovation Center (NTT SIC), Software Engineering Project, in Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Saito’s research interests are in software requirements engineering, design recovery, business modeling, and business process management. During his stay at ISR, Dr. Saito has formed productive relationships with multiple ISR faculty members. Dr. Saito’s managers and colleagues from NTT SIC, Software Engineering Project have also made shorter visits to ISR, adding to the warm relationship that has been established between ISR and NTT SIC.
Most recently, Saito is collaborating with Prof. André van der Hoek; the collaboration will continue after Saito returns to Japan this summer. Together, Dr. Saito, Prof. van der Hoek, and van der Hoek’s graduate student Adriana Meza Soria have been studying issue tracking inside NTT. As a large corporation, NTT processes tens of thousands of both usage-oriented issues and code-oriented issues. Making sure that these are handled effectively and efficiently represents a serious challenge. The team is addressing this challenge by studying the kinds of issues being processed, how they are being processed, and how smart tools may be able to provide assistance.
“Working with Shinobu, and NTT more broadly, has been an absolute delight,” says van der Hoek. “Working at a distance with the home NTT team to precisely identify the problem took of course some time, but we are now in full swing in investigating how we can design solutions that would not only benefit NTT, but other organizations in the same boat.”
Dr. Saito reflected on his time at UCI. “I’ve had the most fulfilling and productive days at UCI’s Institute for Software Research, thanks to fantastic researchers and students who work in state-of-art software engineering domains. I am moved by the way they are always searching for the fundamental essence of their research issues and problems.
“Of course, theory and practice do not always correlate. From the perspective of an industrial researcher, I reaffirm the importance of collaborations between industry and academia to constantly tackle issues in innovative business from long term view points.”
We are delighted to have built a such a rewarding relationship with Dr. Saito and NTT Software Innovation Center, and have thoroughly enjoyed having Dr. Saito here at ISR!