Spotlight

NEW! Southern California Software Engineering Symposium (SuCSES)

ISR launched a new event on June 7: the Southern California Software Engineering Symposium (SuCSES). 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.

Keynote Speakers Dr. Hans-Martin Will, SAP, left and Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, Google, right.SuCSES 2019 featured two engaging keynote speakers. The event opened with Dr. Hans-Martin Will, Head of SAP’s new Innovation Center in Newport Beach, whose talk was titled “When Everything is an Experiment – Software Engineering in the Age of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.” To conclude the program, Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, Staff Research Scientist at Google, spoke on the topic of “Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion.”

With an eye towards building community, the program included talks by faculty from five regional universities in addition to UCI. The speakers were: Prof. Yongjie Zheng, CSU San Marcos; Prof. William Griswold, UC San Diego; Prof. Tevfik Bultan, UC Santa Barbara; Prof. Manu Sridharan, UC Riverside; ISR Prof. Nenad Medvidović, USC; and ISR Profs. Iftekhar Ahmed and Cristina Lopes from UCI.

Ph.D. student Ismet Burak Kadron, UCSB, presents his research poster to SuCSES attendees.A poster and demo session held at lunch featured over 20 projects by students and faculty from UCI, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Riverside and USC. This was a great opportunity for attendees to interact one-on-one with researchers from UCI and regional universities and learn about projects firsthand.

SuCSES 2019 attracted nearly 140 attendees from 19 companies, and 17 regional, national, and international universities. Alumni turned out in abundance, as is the tradition for ISR’s annual event. Attendees commented enthusiastically on the wide range of participation from local universities, the timeliness and strength of the research addressed in the faculty talks and the posters/demos, and the value added by the industry keynote talks.

Alumna Dr. Kristina Nasr (Ph.D. 2010, D. Richardson, advisor), Software Engineer, Google, reflected on the event: “I absolutely loved attending SuCSES at UCI, and it’s something I plan on attending in the future. It was interesting to hear the presentations about software engineering, particularly about reviewing software and testing software. Being in industry and developing software with the tools we have at hand, we don’t really get exposed to new research like this. It was also wonderful to chat with the professors I met as a student in the Informatics Department and with friends who were there at the same time.”

Alumni congregate at SuCSES with ISR Director Emeritus Prof. Richard Taylor. Left to right: Dr. Kristina Nasr, Google; Dr. Leyna Cotran, Lyft; Dr. Owen O’Malley, Cloudera; Kari Nies, UCI ISR; Dr. Eric Dashofy, The Aerospace Corp.; Prof. Nenad Medvidović, USC; Prof. Taylor; Prof. Youngjie Zheng, CSUSM; Dr. Hiroko Wilensky, Boeing; Debra Brodbeck, UCI ISR; and ISR DIrector Sam Malek.Read more about the event in this Message from the Director.

For additional information, visit the 2019 SuCSES website.

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

This article appeared in ISR Connector issue: