Grant: Canada Research Chairs

My research aims to understand and improve how software developers can be empowered through engineering tools and processes so they can create useful, ethical, safe and reliable software. Developer tools have started leveraging data-centric machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) by integrating and applying algorithms, and data and computational models of human and collaborative software engineering activities to the design, deployment and evolution of software. Modern developer tools that mine and leverage data help developers automate tedious and repetitive tasks, and provide new opportunities for solving development problems in ways they could not have anticipated before, are having a disruptive impact on software development. These advancements rely on vast amounts of data available from open software development and knowledge resources that are authored by a long line of developers. AI shows potential to speed up software development, but our knowledge of how AI will impact the broader aspects of software development are lacking. Despite the excitement of AI for software engineering, software development is at its core a socio-technical endeavour and both aspects require joint optimization as they shape each other. While today's fast-moving world puts urgent pressure on the faster delivery of ethical and reliable software features, and in turn on the tools developers use. However, whenever any new technology or media is introduced in our society, we need to consider not just how it may amplify or extend our human abilities and capabilities, but also what the technology may make obsolete and what may happen if the technology is misused or overused. We need to understand not just how AI impacts the way developers write software, but also how it may influence the software they build for their end users. Unfortunately, a lot of software engineering research does not directly study the impact of tools on the developers or the end users that rely on the software delivered to them. Thus, I will focus on three overarching objectives: 1) understand and improve how AI can impact developer productivity; 2) investigate how AI will impact software quality; and 3) promote human-centric research for the application of AI to software engineering.