On November 12, 2019, at The 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2019) in San Diego, Professor Miryung Kim gave her keynote speech, “Re-engineering Software Engineering for a Data-centric World.” She was an opening keynote speaker on the first day. ASE is a top conference in software engineering.
Her keynote focused on how the development of big data, machine learning, and AI affects software correctness and developer productivity. She addressed several key points:
- Existing software engineering techniques must be re-imagined to provide the productivity gains that developers desire.
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Defining what a data scientist is, what data scientists do, and the challenges they face, as Prof Kim investigated in her large-scale study of 800 data scientists in collaboration with Microsoft Research, can help the community synthesize their approach to address the needs of the future data-centric software development.
- The need for the SE research community to re-target their direction to address, and solve, the new challenges in the era of data-centric software development.
- Debugging and testing for big data distributed systems such as Apache Spark. She provided detailed examples of her group’s work doing this.
She then concluded with open research problems in software debugging and testing to support data-centric software development and the needs of the AI and ML workforce.
(https://2019.ase-conferences.org/details/ase-2019-papers/92/Re-engineering-Software-Engineering-for-a-Data-centric-World)