1st Workshop on Data and Models and their Duality and Complementarity in Software Engineering

The 1st 1-Week Workshop on Data and Models at the Bellairs Research Institute of McGill University in Holetown, Barbados, is taking place Friday, February 1st, 2019 to Friday, February 8th, 2019. In essence, we want to gather ~15 researchers that are using (runtime) data and models in conjunction to investigate their interplay and complementarity for improving software development and maintenance tasks. To achieve such a purpose, the workshop will gather participants from various Software Engineering disciplines - including Model-Driven Engineering (especially models@runtime), Software Language Engineering, Advanced Compilation, Software Product Lines -, but also researchers from the fields of smart adaptive systems, probabilistic modelling, AI, computational sciences, and scientific computing.

Workshop Details

While the use of models has a longstanding history in software engineering practices, the use of runtime data becomes more and more prevalent in modern practices thanks to their availability, advances in data processing techniques, and the availability of resources on demand (e.g., cloud infrastructures). From existing search-based approaches to advanced predictive methods such as machine learning, the duality and complementarity of data and models appear more and more apparent in the various phases of the software development lifecycle. Not only restricted to empirical studies for scientific purposes, but such practices also open many opportunities in the development of future software systems for exploiting real data or engineering expertise as part of the whole software lifecycle. This includes smart recommendations at requirement and design time, advanced feedback loops based on seamless and continuous DevOps activities, and new development paradigms incorporating predictive models to implement smart systems relying on informed decisions.

We expect the workshop to be highly interactive and open-minded, with the main objective to brainstorm on the opportunities and underlying challenges of the duality and complementarity of data and models in software engineering.

As a possible outcome, we envision the collaborative definition of a research statement (or manifesto), with an associated roadmap that would help the software engineering community to drive and structure future investigations. We also envision possible subgroups on specific scenarios to establish relevant case studies or benchmarks, as well as preliminary demonstrators.