Lero Newsletter

Newsletter December 2017

INSIDE EU software research programme

1

Ireland has been selected to manage a new €3.6 million EU fellowship programme for international software researchers.

DCU Presidents Awards

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Lero@DCU members Markus Helfert (Project Lead), Marija Bezbradica and Manoj Kesavulu have received the prestigious DCU Presidents Award for Industrial Engagement

Vanessa is on Cloud9

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Vanessa Ayala-Rivera with Cloud9, an early-stage big data venture, won a University College Dublin (UCD) commercialisation award.

Science Week

10

Lero had a very successful Science Week 2017 Nov 12-19.

WELCOME TO THE LATEST ISSUE OF THE LERO NEWSLETTER Welcome to the latest edition of the Lero newsletter. It has been another remarkable year in the tremendous success story that is Lero. Much of the early part of the year was occupied by our mid-term review in May 2017. A group of world-leading researchers visited us for a few days to assess our progress, and were extremely positive awarding us a score of 4.8 out of a maximum possible score of 5. This success was based on enormous effort

by the Lero community across its various institutions. Well done to all.

Please enjoy the fabulous success stories below, involving a great number of Lero members across our partner institutions. If you are not featured, we look forward to including your success story in a future edition. In the meantime, belated best wishes for 2017.

EU software research programme “The aim of ALECS is to help generate a diverse, mobile, skilled workforce which will contribute to European research and innovation. The fact that Ireland was selected to manage this strategically important programme is recognition of the country’s international reputation in software research,” commented Dr Mary Shire, Vice President research at UL

Ireland has been selected to manage a new €3.6 million EU fellowship programme for international software researchers. ALECS (Advanced Learning in Evolving Critical Systems) will be co-ordinated by UL and Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre. The initiative is being funded by the EC under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme and by Science Foundation Ireland through Lero.

Under the ALECS programme Ireland will benefit from the influx of 26 international advanced software researchers. The fellowships will be open to overseas PhD degree holders or researchers with at least four years’ high-level research background. The benefits will be spread across Irish industry as the two-year programme will require a 3-6 month secondment to an industry partner.

The launch coincides with the first meeting of PERFORM, a recently announced €3.8 million EU programmwe headed up by Lero and DCU designed to enable European high street and online retailers counter the competitive threat posed by foreign global players.

“The ALECS programme reflects the fact that software-based systems are increasingly important to economic activity and to the normal functioning of our everyday lives. The scope, scale and interconnected nature of such systems are increasing rapidly, with the potential consequences of failure, security breaches or malfunction becoming a growing cause of concern,” added Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Director of Lero.

Dr Darrin Morrissey, director of programmes at Science Foundation Ireland said, “The ALECS programme is an excellent example of the type of international collaboration Science Foundation Ireland aims to encourage. We have developed a strong base of outstanding and impactful software research in this country and we are delighted that it is being recognised on the global stage. Ireland is ranked first in the world for knowledge diffusion and the ALECS programme stands to reinforce this standing.”

The first call for proposals will be published before end of November and the first researchers are expected to start their fellowship in August 2018. They will be based across seven Irish universities – all of which are members of Lero.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 754489.

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Bashar & the Prince

DCU Presidents Awards Lero@DCU members Markus Helfert (Project Lead), Marija Bezbradica and Manoj Kesavulu have received the prestigious DCU Presidents Award for Industrial Engagement for their project with IBM on “Usage Analytics – User level SaaS-based Usage Analytics”. The project goal is to investigate user-level usage analysis in cloud systems analysing customer usage data. The team investigates approaches for analysing cloud on/ off-boarding trends, trajectories and risk assessments to determine which features and functions are used in cloud systems. Suitable application scenarios and cloud based systems are being investigated to develop a suitable architectural approach.

Bashar Nuseibeh attended a reception at Buckingham Palace on 27th February 2017, hosted by Prince Andrew, The Duke of York, and The President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Professor Bai. The reception focused on promoting the International Talent Programme of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (PIFI), which aims to enhance the internationalization of Chinese research teams, by financing outstanding foreign scientific and technological talents, to engage deeply with CAS researchers. Bashar discussed with Prince Andrew how to bring down barriers for western researchers to visit and engage with fellow Chinese researchers. He also discussed with President Bai several different forms of potential collaboration and exchange, particularly in areas such as software engineering. Following on from this reception Jesus Galan, Lero @ UL, presented his research at the 6th Asian Workshop of Advanced Software Engineering (AWASE2017) which was held in Chongqing, China. (http://www.swu-rise. net.cn/AWASE2017/AWASE2017.html).

SIRG Award Starting Investigator Research Grant (SIRG) enables early-career researchers to become excellent, fully independent research leaders and carry out research aligned to SFI’s legal remit (oriented basic and applied research in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Starting Investigator Research Grant (SIRG) aims to enable those at an early career stage to establish themselves as independent researchers. It is a four year award, value of award €400,000 including salary of SIRG and PhD studentship.

Both Liliana Pasquale Klass-Jan Stol received a SIRG award last year (missed out of the last newsletter, sorry!)

Lero would like to congratulate them both on winning this prestigious award.

IET Innovation Award for Cybersecurity Bashar Nuseibeh together with colleagues from The Open University have won the 2017 IET Innovation Award for Cybersecurity, for their novel wearable privacy management device, “Privacy Band”.

The device allows users to have discreet, real-time awareness of potential privacy threats and to control access to their data using intuitive and adaptive (L to R: Bashar Nuseibeh, on-body interaction Arosha Bandara, Vikram techniques. Further Mehta, Blaine Price) information about the Privacy Band, and the underlying interaction innovation can be found in the paper published by the research team at the 2016 ACM International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI): Mehta, Vikram; Bandara, Arosha; Price, Blaine and Nuseibeh, Bashar (2016), “Privacy Itch and Scratch: On Body Privacy Warnings and Controls”, In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, San Jose, USA. The technology behind the Privacy Band is the subject of patent applications, and builds on the collaboration between the SPARE research group in Lero (http://spare.lero.ie) and the SEAD research group at The Open University (http:// sead1.open.ac.uk).

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National Scratch Finals The National Scratch finals were hosted by Lero @ UL in April. There were over 545 entries, 49% male participants, 51% female and 50+ judges! Thanks you to Chris Exton for providing the keynote, Asanka Wasala for the fantastic animation and to Fayola, Muneef, Ger, Denis and of course Clare.

Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng) Complementing our Scratch program at primary level, we also introduced our Professional Doctorate this year also. While the conventional PhD represents a contribution to scientific knowledge, the Professional Doctorate requires a significant contribution to organisational practice. Aimed at the many experienced practitioners in Irish industry, not all of whom have an honours primary degree and are thus ineligible for entry to Masters and PhD programs, this program aims to recognise the wonderful and creative way in which they solve complex organisational problems.

The first cohort have already commenced and we are recruiting a second cohort at present. More details at https://www.ul.ie/pdeng/

FamLab 2017 Bilal Ahmad, Lero@UL, took part in a FameLab event sponsored by the British Council and held at BellTable in Limerick. Multidisciplinary researchers from all across Limerick participated in this event and explained their work to a lay audience.

Bilal presented his work to the audience and judges in just 3 minutes and used visual cues/props. He stressed the importance of novel and simple technologies which could help to better integrate older adults into their communities. He discussed a new app which he has developed recently with IBM for elderly people. One of the key objectives of the app is to provide older adults with information about volunteer opportunities in their local communities. It was emphasised that older adults are a great resource of knowledge and skills, acquired over a lifetime, and that they should be valued more by their communities. Providing older adults with this simple mobile app can really help to alleviate their social isolation and loneliness, as not only does it help the older person to become more active by providing volunteer opportunities, but it can also help that person to communicate easily with family and friends. The next step is to test the application and to see how it works in practice. The need and importance of this type of app was acknowledged by the judges.

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Vanessa is on Cloud9 Vanessa Ayala-Rivera with Cloud9, an early-stage big data venture, won a University College Dublin (UCD) commercialisation award. Cloud9 is developing a new software service to enable organisations to effectively and efficiently desensitise personal data in-house before uploading it securely to the cloud for processing. The founder of Cloud9 is Vanessa Ayala-Rivera who is based in UCD and working under the supervision of Professor Liam Murphy.

The Cloud9 solution is an anonymisation engine which allows companies and organisations to desensitise personal data in-house, by applying diverse data obfuscation and anonymisation techniques, thereby protecting the data, before uploading it to the cloud for processing. In addition, the solution is aiming to automate the identification of sensitive information, based on self-learning algorithms that discover new data patterns on-the-fly, to facilitate the automatic configuration of privacy policies.

Vanessa, said: “Data security continues to be one of the primary obstacles that prevents the adoption of cloud services, especially in the case of software-as-a-service.

Through the outputs of my research at UCD I am developing a tool to enable companies and organisations to

implement a software service to protect critical information in-house, in compliance with data protection legislation, before they upload it to the cloud… I now aim to seek Enterprise Ireland commercialisation funding to help bring this technology to the next stage of development.” http://www.ucd.ie/innovation/newsevents/news/2017/may/ phdstudentoncloud9afterwinningucdcommercialisationaward/

Lero at Conferences, workshops and talks Tiziana Margaria, Lero@UL, was Program Committee Chair of DTIS, the 12th International Conference on Design &Technology of Integrated Systems in Nanoscale Era in Spain.

The conference addresses design, test and technology of electronic products, ranging from integrated circuit modules and printed circuit boards to full systems and microsystems, as well as the methodologies and tools used in the design, verification and validation of such products.

There were three papers with Lero co-authors in a special session on “System level design & development of secure applications with SEcube(TM)” at DTIS, the 12th In-

ternational Conference on Design &Technology of Integrated Systems in Nanoscale Era in Spain: 1) Securing C/C++ Applications with a SEcube(TM)-based Model-driven Approach (Frederik Gossen, Johannes Neubauer, Bernhard Steffen) 2) Model Checking of Security Properties: A Case Study on Human-Robot Interaction Processes (Giuseppe Airò Farulla, Anna-Lena Lamprecht) 3) A fully Model-based Approach to the Design of the SEcube(TM) Community Web App, Steve Boßelmann, Dennis Kühn, Tiziana Margaria.

Faeq Alrimawi, Lero@UL, presented a paper at the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering

for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems (SEsCPS’17) that was co-located with the 39th international conference on software engineering, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, entitled “Software Engineering Challenges For Investigating Cyber-Physical Incidents.

Sarah Beecham, Lero@UL, presented a paper at the annual 12th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE’17), in Buenos Aires, Argentina entitled “Do we teach the right thing? A Comparison of GSE Education and Practice”.

Peter Rust, Lero@UL, gave a STEM careers presentation as part of the Smart Futures STEM Careers

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Roadshow at the SciFest Science Fair (SciFest@DkIT) in April 2017 which was hosted in DkIT. Dr. Emil Vassev, Lero@UL, participated in the Panel “Future Challenges and Opportunities: Urbanization, Mobility and Sustainability”, which was the opening session of the 3rd International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS), April, Portugal Tiziana Margaria Lero@UL, was invited to talk to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg Sweden. The talk concerned a fully model driven approach to the design of secure software and systems (based on the SEcube hardware security).

Eoin Cullina, Kieran Conboy and Lorraine Morgan, Lero@NUIG, presented their research entitled “Driving Entrepreneurship through Crowdsourcing in Scientific Research Funding Agencies” at Collective Intelligence 2017 at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Denis Dennehy, Lero@NUIG and Alex Estevam, DellEMC, delivered two presentations about their ongoing flow-based software development research at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Guimarães, Portugal.

Brian Fitzgerald, Audris Mockus and Minghui Szhou were Organizing Chairs for the Shonan School entitled “Towards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability”, which took place at Shonan, Japan June, 2017. Attendees from 16 countries representing both academic research and industry participated. Tiziana Margaria, Lero@UL, was Program Committee Chair of DTIS, the 12th International Conference on Design &Technology of Integrated Systems in Nanoscale Era in Spain. The conference addresses design, test and technology of electronic products, ranging from integrated circuit modules and printed circuit boards to full systems and microsystems, as well as the methodologies and tools used in the design, verification and validation of such products.

There were three papers with Lero co-authors in a special session on “System level design & development of secure applications with SEcube(TM)” at DTIS, the 12th International Conference on Design &Technology of Integrated Systems in Nanoscale Era in Spain: 1) Securing C/C++ Applications with a SEcube(TM)-based Model-driven Approach (Frederik Gossen, Johannes Neubauer, Bernhard Steffen) 2) Model Checking of Security Properties: A Case Study on Human-Robot Interaction Processes (Giuseppe Airò Farulla, Anna-Lena Lamprecht) 3) A fully Model-based Approach to the Design of the SEcube(TM) Community Web App, Steve Boßelmann, Dennis Kühn, Tiziana Margaria.

Ita Richardson presented and chaired the Journal First session on Software Engineering in Connected Health at the International Conference on Software and Systems Process in Paris. The papers presented have been submitted to the special issue of the Journal on Software Evolution and Process, which she is guest editing with Noel Carroll and Prof Craig Kuziemsky.

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Liliana Pasquale, Lero@UCD, cochaired with Dr. Dalal Alrajeh (Imperial College London) the 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering and Digital Forensics (SERF 2017). The workshop was co-located with the 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the Foundation of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2017) in Padeborn, Germany. More information can be found at: http://serf.ucd.ie Klaas-Jan Stol, Lero@UL, attended and co-organised the Fall 2017 Edition of the InnerSource Summit in Naperville, IL, USA, which attracted approx.

60 participants from a wide range of companies that are adopting Inner Source. This was the 5th edition of this event which is organised twice annually in the USA and Europe.

Lorraine Morgan, Lero@NUIG, and Klaas-Jan Stol participated in a panel at the Grace Hopper Celebration 2017 in Orlando, FL, USA. The panel, entitled “Inner Source: Companies are Leveraging the Wisdom of Open Source” was scheduled twice due to a significant interest, and was attended by approx 130 people. The panel also included Padma Sudarsan from Nokia, Erin Bank from CA Technologies, and Jim Jagielski from CapitalOne and the Apache Foundation. Other speakers

at GHC 2017, which attracted 18,000 delegates, included Melinda Gates.

Liliana Pasquale presented her paper titled “On Evidence Preservation Requirements for Forensic-ready Systems” at the 11th Joint Symposium of the European Software Engineering Conference and the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2017) in Padeborn, Germany. The paper was co-authored with Dalal Alrajeh and Bashar Nuseibeh.

Matthew Hennessy, Lero@TCD, attended the Shonan Meeting Seminar 102 on “Reverse Execution in Testing – Improving Security and Reliability”, Shonan Village Centre Japan, July. (http://shonan.nii.ac.jp/seminar/102/) Matthew Hennessy gave an invited talk, “Property Logics for Communicating Transactions”, at the workshop Open Problems in Concurrency Theory II, Vienna, June. (http://opct2017.famaf.unc.edu.ar/ Home.html) Ann Barcomb, Lero@UL, presented her research on managing episodic contributors in open source communities at two practitioner conferences this autumn: Open Source Summit in Prague in October and in a keynote

at the London Perl Workshop on November 25th. She also wrote an article entitled ‘How to manage casual contributors to open source projects’ for opensource.com.

Mike Hinchey, Lero@UL, was invited

by UNESCO to be a panellist at the 2nd International Day for Universal Access to Information, celebrated throughout the world but with the official event being in Balaclava, Mauritius, where Mike participated.

David Gregg of Lero@TCD gave an invited talk at the ARM Research Summit on September 12th. This is an annual event hosted by ARM Research at Cambridge University, where speakers talk about their recent research developments that are of interest to ARM. The talk, “Low memory multichannel convolution using general matrix multiplication”, dealt with memory-efficient approaches to deploying deep neural networks on resource-constrained multicore embedded systems.

Mehvish Rashid, Lero@DCU, Faeq Alrimawi, Lero@UL, and Rafael Dantas, Lero@UL, participated in the Technology Showcase fo r the Limerick Lifelong Learning Festival on Saturday April 1st in Mary Immaculate College.

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Lero- OU_NII meet in Khalifa The annual NII-Lero-OU workshop (http:// ra.crema.unimi.it/CPSS2017/index.htm) was held this year at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE, between 7-8th April 2017. This year’s workshop theme was “Software Engineering for Cyber-Physical-Social Systems”.

Bashar Nuseibeh from Lero co-chaired the workshop, together with Professor Ernesto Damiani, Director of the Information Security Centre at Khalifa University. Professor Nobukazu Yoshioka, an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan, and currency visiting Lero at the University of Limerick on sabbatical, served as workshop programme co-chair. NII is an international strategic research partner of Lero, with a formal joint Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that has facilitated collaborations in software research and education for many years.

The 3rd International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS) was held in Porto on April 22nd and 23rd last. It brought together over 70 engineers, researchers and practitioners interested in the advances and applications in the field of Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems.

The industry panel sessions were chaired by Joe Gibbs, Lero@ UL, and included presentations and a panel discussion from representatives of Ford USA, Siemens, BrightBox and DVK Insurance To close the conference Lero’s Emil Vassev, gave a keynote speech on his experience with Autonomy Requirements Engineering (ARE) and autonomy for smart vehicles. The emphasis was on using ARE to extend upstream control software with special self-managing objectives intended to provide an ability to autonomously and automatically discover, diagnose, and cope with various problems that need to be overcome during vehicle operation.

Program Co-Chair of the conference was Lero’s own Markus Helfert while Sandra Gannon from IBM in Galway also participated in the program as well as presenting at the accompanying SmartGreens Conference, Co-Chair of which was Brian Donnellan.

Digital Business Research Day (DBRD) 2017 The first international Digital Business Research Day was held at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. The conference is embedded in the annual “International Week”. The conference provides a platform for researchers and students to present their research in progress and to discuss pressing issues. Example issues were: how to publish research results in high quality outlets, how to position research and research contributions, how to apply research methods, or how to structure and systematically plan a good PhD-thesis. The conference team consisted of experienced researchers and professors, providing an opportunity for discussion of research projects in an academically stimulating atmosphere.

Moreover, the Digital Business Research Day provides multiple networking opportunities, embedded into a cosy and friendly atmosphere on our campus.

Synergy-zing in the GSE Community: How Academia and Industry can educate each other Sarah Beecham organised an “Open Space” session at the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE’17) co-located with ICSE in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 22nd May. The revolving panel format gave many prominent industry and academics the opportunity to voice their opinions on the current state of Global Software Engineering Education. Tony Clear (AUT, New Zealand), John Noll (UEL, London), and V.S Mani (Siemens, India) kicked off the discussions, and successfully provoked many other academics and practitioners to take the hot seat, to including: Marcelo Cataldo (Dell Technologies), Paulo Caroli (ThoughtWorks Brazil), Paul Robinson (Sony, USA), David Redmiles (UC Irvine) and Anita Sarma (Oregan State Univ), Sabrina Marczak (PUCRS, Brazil). A verly lively and dynamic session was enjoyed by all.

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Keynotes

ICSE 2017 Prof. Siobhan Clarke, Lero@TCD, gave the opening Keynote address at SEAMS 2017,- the 12th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self Managing Systems, which was held in Buenos Aires in May 2017.

Siobhan’s presentation was entitled “Exploring Different Software Paradigms in Adaptive Systems”. (http://wp.doc. ic.ac.uk/seams2017/).

Bashar Nuseibeh, Lero@UL, gave the keynote address at the 3rd international workshop on Software Engineering for Smart Cyber Physical Systems (SEsCPS), which was co-located with ICSE 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 21st May 2017. His talk was entitled: “Crossing Boundaries: On the Inevitable Intertwining of Digital, Physical, and Social Spaces”. The workshop website is at: http://d3s.mff.cuni.cz/ conferences/sescps2017.

Brian Donnellan, Lero@NUIM, gave a keynote on Smart Cities at a Japanese-Korean Bi-Lateral Research Seminar in Okinawa.

Anthony Ventresque Lero@UCD, gave a keynote on “Multi-objective Virtual Machine Reassignment for Large Scale Data Centres” at the sixth National Conference on Cloud Computing and Commerce (11th of April).

This event was organised by the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce and the H2020 project “Cloud Lightening”.

Dr. Emil Vassev, Lero@UL, was a keynote speaker at the 3rd International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS), April 22-24, Porto, Portugal Liliana Pasquale delivered a keynote talk at the Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice (SER&IP) Workshop, co-located with ICSE 2017 Conference in Buenos Aires. The talk was entitled “Topology Aware Adaptive Security” and was describing the ongoing collaboration with United Technology Research on access control.

Bashar Nuseibeh gave the keynote address at the annual ACM workshop on Cyber Physical Systems Security (CPSS 2017), which was co-located this year with the Asia CCS 2017 conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on 2nd April 2017. Bashar spoke “On the Disappearing Boundary Between Digital, Physical and Social Spaces”, and discussed its impact on software engineering for security and privacy.

ICSE 2017 Brian Fitzgerald delivered a keynote talk at the Rapid Continuous Software Engineering (RCoSE) Workshop, co-located with ICSE 2017 Conference in Buenos Aires. The talk was entitled “Rapid Continuous Software Engineering: Six Sigma and Slime”

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Best paper & Awards Whitaker Research Day Poster Award

International Summer School Mairead O’Connor, PhD candidate, Lero@NUI Galway, went on a fully sponsored international summer school programme for PhD candidates by the Dean of the School of Business Administration at Northeastern University (NEU), Shenyang, Liaoning Province, in China. The twelve-day program was a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural class of international PhD candidates from different universities in different countries and was facilitated by invited professors from well-known universities from within and outside of China.

New Editor-in-chief

Eoin Cullina, Kieran Conboy and Lorraine Morgan, all Lero@NUIG, won a prize at the Whitaker Research Day, April 2017 for their poster entitled; “A Crowdsourcing Practices Framework for Scientific Research Funding Agencies”.

Best Conference Track Paper at the 37th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) was awarded to Brian Fitzgerald and Klaas Stol, Lero@UL, for their paper entitled, Problematizing Agile in the Large: Alternative Assumptions for Large-Scale Agile Development.

Sarah Beecham and Abdur Razzak, both Lero@UL, won best short paper award at EASE in Karlskrona, Sweden June 2017-Motivation and Autonomy in Global Software Development: An Empirical Study Alexandre Pujol Lero@UCD won the ‘Best Poster’ award for his poster, “Collecting Metadata on an Instant Messaging Server” ECCWS 2017

Annual Lero-Open University Research Workshop held in Limerick

Bashar Nuseibeh, Lero@UL, has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), for a three-year term starting on 1st October 2017 (http://taas.acm.org). Autonomous and Adaptive Systems is one of Lero’s four core hubs (http:// www.lero.ie/research/hubspokeresearch), and the appointment underlines Lero’s international leadership in this research area.

Ita Richardson, Lero@UL, has been appointed as Special Advisor on Equality and Diversity to the President of UL. In this role, she has attended recent conferences in London and Berlin.

IFIP and Lero Liliana Pasquale was officially nominated member of the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Working group 2.9 on Requirements Engineering. Members of this group are leading researchers in software engineering who present recent work, and discuss challenges facing the field of Requirements Engineering research.

Mike Hinchey chaired the IFIP General Assembly in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 9-12 September and was Chief Guest for the 2017 National IT Conference, the biggest ever IT Conference in Sri Lanka.

Seven Smart Cities

Research teams from The Open University’s Software Engineering & Design (SEAD) research group (http://sead1.open.ac.uk/) and Lero’s Security, Privacy, Adaptation & Requirements Engineering (SPARE) research group (http://spare.lero.ie/) met at the University of Limerick (UL) for their annual “away days” research workshop on 17-20 July 2017. The workshop programme included working groups discussing software engineering, security, privacy and digital forensics applications in the areas of health & wellbeing, aviation, policing and adaptive systems. The workshop opened with a keynote by Professor Michel Jackson and closed with a mindfulness session for the attendees. An open research poster sessions also drew visitors from across Lero and UL CSIS Department.

Brian Donnellan, Lero@Maynooth University met with seven Irish cities for the first All-Ireland cities forum. With technology recognised as an enabler of social and economic good, smart cities place a focus on creating environments to test new ideas, attract investment, enable service reform and promote partner collaboration. The forum, which isn’t mandated by the Government, aims to discover what the best practice for smart cities is and should be. The forum is made up of local government officials representing Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, Belfast and Derry.

“Any forum on smart cities should adhere to the principle of the city user as consumers and that is our main purpose how to make life better for the inhabitants of these modern cities,” Prof. Donnellan said

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Systems and Software

Science Week

Sarah Beecham has been nominated to the Editorial Board of Journal of Systems & Software.

She begins her term as Assistant Editor in October.

Tech 100 Mike Hinchey was named by Business & Finance in its Tech 100 for 2017.

Invited Speaker

COMPUTER CLASS: Fionnáin Ó hOisín, Oisín Ó Conghaile, Rachel Prendagast, Maedhbh Ní Threasaigh and Olivia Ward of Gaelscoil Chaladh An Treoigh, in Limerick, have fun with a robot at a Science Week workshop at Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre, at the University of Limerick.

Prof Haruhiko Kaiya, Kanagawa University, Japan: Modelling Goal Dependencies and Domain Model Together- in June

Lero had a very successful Science Week 2017 Nov 12-19. Sorren Hanvey, Rafael Dantas, Faeq Alrimawi, Fayola Peters and Clare McInerney ran technology workshops for 120 primary schools students on the Tuesday and Thursday. A photo from the technology workshops was featured on the Irish Times Images of the Day https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/images-of-the-day-1.3291954 Bilal Ahmad and Mohannad Abdur Razzak participated in the Limerick Famelab competition on the Wednesday in Limerick. Joe Walsh in IT Tralee ran a STEM Enterprise and Careers Expo on Friday and STEM Showcase and Family Day on the Saturday as part of the Kerry Science Festival. Thanks to everyone involved in Science Week activities. If you were involved in events in your institution, please let us know.

ICSSP 2017 Ita Richardson from Lero @UL and Dr. Özden Özcan–Top from Lero @ DkIT attended the International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP) in July 2017 which took place in Paris. Both Ita and Özden were involved in HELENA project’s workshop which was held on the first day of the conference. The HELENA project aims to develop “hybrid approaches” in software and systems development and comprises more than 60 partners from more than 20 countries.

Dr. Özcan-Top also presented their latest work with Dr. Fergal McCaffery at the Journal First Session, chaired by Prof. Richardson.

The work presented in this session, titled “A Continuous Improvement Approach for Medical Device Software Development Companies”, has been submitted to special issue of Journal of Software Evolution and Process: Connected Health, editors of which are Dr. Noel Carroll, Prof. Craig Kuziemsky and Prof.

Ita Richardson.

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Christmas Parties Bright Summer School

And finally… the Lero Christmas parties! For those based in the Ancient East there was a Lero Christmas lunch at the end of November with more than 30 people joining in. Sadly, or perhaps luckily, there are no photos from this event. The Wild Atlantic Way team had their party on December 1st and luckily there are photos…….

BRIGHT Summer School Lecturers and Organisers: Dr Benjamin Kanagwa, Dr Xiaofeng Wang, Prof Michel Chaudron, Prof Ita Richardson, Dr Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Kamulegeya Grace Bugembe, Dr Eric Knauss.

Invited by colleagues at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Ita Richardson, Lero@UL, lectured at the Bright Summer School in Software Engineering organised by the Systems and Software Centre at Makerere University, Kampala,Uganda. Ita presented on Software Quality, Software Regulations in Healthcare and Connected Health, about which she is researching within Lero and the Health Research Institute at the University of Limerick. The Summer School was attended by over 40 students and faculty, and the other visiting lecturers were Dr Xiaofeng Wang, University of Bolzano, who previously was a post-doctoral researcher in Lero@ UL, Dr Eric Knauss, University of Gothenburg, and Prof Michel Chaudron, University of Gothenburg. Apart from lectures and tutorials, 14 students presented their research during a PhD symposium, getting feedback from the lecturers and their own colleagues.

The Bright Summer School is sponsored by SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, through a project funded to University of Gothenburg, Chalmers University, both in Sweden, Mbarare University of Science and Technology and Makerere Univeristy, both in Uganda and is jointly led by Prof Engineer Bainomugisha (Makerere University) and Prof Michel Chaudon, University of Gothenburg. The aim of the project is to contribute towards sustainable socio-economic growth in Uganda. Ten PhD students from Uganda, who are researching the areas of digital innovation, software engineering and entrepreneurship are being trained through this research program.

Travelling to Uganda has been an interesting experience for Ita – from visiting the University and its facilities, to visiting locations in Kampala, where traffic is interestingly chaotic. The students have been given a great opportunity through the SIDA sponsorship - seven PhD students have spent between 1 month and 1 year in the University of Gothenburg and others plan to travel there during the next year.

Thanks to the school organisers, hosts at the College of Computing and Information Science, Dr Regina Hebig, University of Gothenburg, who proposed Ita for this opportunity, and to SIDA, sponsors of the Summer School.

All 2017 publications are available to view in Linx or on the Lero website

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