Second Working Seminar of the AI4Software Research Network

On January 16th and 17th, we were fortunate to attend the Second Working Seminar of the AI4Software Research Network, organized by our colleagues at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC), Gregorio Robles and Jesús Gonzalez Barahona.

The seminar was primarily structured around two highly engaging roundtables and a “lightning talk” session to showcase the latest work from each node, ranging from evolutionary algorithms underpinning AutoML proposals to LLM-based agents for requirements engineering. The network’s maturity was evident in the volume and quality of the presented work.

In our case, Chema delivered the “lightning talk” for the University of Extremadura node, presenting, first, our systematic evaluation framework for multi-agent systems based on LLMs for software development and, second, our proposal to organize an AI4Software Summer School in Cáceres, with more details to follow soon.

Additionally, Roberto had the privilege of participating in the roundtable “Where is AI4SE research heading? Expert reflections on trends, emerging areas, and outdated approaches in AI advancements for Software Engineering”. This discussion covered highly relevant topics, such as the application of LLMs in various software development tasks and the need for the network to explore ways to incorporate LLMs (and agents) into undergraduate Software Engineering programs.

To conclude, a demo session was held where, among other projects, the URJC demo on code visualization in augmented reality caught our attention, using, for instance, the city metaphor as in CodeCity. Below, you can see a small web app that allows you to visualize a researcher’s publications with this metaphor using her ORCID. The example uses Tim Berners-Lee’s ORCID.

These were intense but highly rewarding days of work. We return re-energized to continue our research efforts in this field.

If you found this interesting, we encourage you to visit the AI4Software Research Network website.

If you’d like to learn more about our research lines in applying AI to software development, feel free to get in touch with us and we’ll share more details.