Second Working Seminar of the AI4Software Research Network

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

The seminar was organized mainly around two very interesting round tables and a session of “lightning talks” to learn about the most current work of each node, from evolutionary algorithms behind AutoML proposals to LLM-based agents for requirements engineering. The maturity of the network was evident in the quantity and quality of the work presented.

In our case, Chema delivered the “lightning talk” for the University of Extremadura node, presenting, first, our line of systematic evaluation of LLM-based multi-agent systems for software development and, second, our proposal to organize an AI4Software Summer School in Cáceres, of which we will share more news soon.

Additionally, Roberto had the opportunity to participate in the round table “Where is AI4SE research heading? Expert reflection on trends, emerging areas and approaches that have become obsolete in AI advances in Software Engineering”, which addressed very interesting topics in the current application of LLMs in different software development tasks and also discussed the need for the network to work on how to incorporate the use of LLMs (and agents) into the university Software Engineering degree.

Finally, a demo session was held in which, among other works, we were particularly impressed by the URJC demo of code visualization in augmented reality, using for example the city metaphor as in CodeCity. Below you can see a small web app that allows you to visualize a researcher’s publications with that metaphor using their ORCID. In the example, Tim Berners Lee’s is used.

These have been very intense days of work but also very rewarding. And we return with full energy to continue with our research work in this line.

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

If you’d like to know more about our research lines in applying AI to software development, get in touch with us and we’ll tell you about it.