The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous in every walk of life, from transportation to digital assistants. Software engineering is also benefiting from this rise of AI; however, the full potential has not been exploited so far. While testing is already a beneficiary of this rise, planning, modeling, design, and analysis phases are also catching up quickly. The current maturity of AI is ready to take software engineering to the next level. However, with great potential also come new challenges. Some of the important questions to be asked are:
- How will AI improve, accelerate, or disrupt the current practices of software engineering and vice versa?
- How will AI enable developers to write software that learn like humans?
- Will AI enable engineers to develop smart and intelligent applications or will it threaten their eventual existence because of the AI-created automatic software?
- How do we build explainable software models, how do we generate explanations from them, and how might we evaluate explainability of those models?
- What could be the associated social, societal, legal, ethical, and environmental challenges for the technology spawned by the rise of AI?
This theme issue invites papers covering any aspect related to applications of AI in software engineering, including, but not limited to:
- Explainable AI for software engineering
- AI for better requirements reasoning and refinement
- Software specification, verification, validation, testing, and traceability
- Automated test case generation and prioritization
- Automated (or semi-automated) program repair
- Monitoring running systems (e.g., using anomaly detectors) or optimizing those systems (e.g., using search-based software engineering)
- Mining software repositories to learn predictive and quality models
- Automatic (or human-supported) configuration tools
- Planning, modeling, and analysis
- Software architecture designs and decisions
- Man-machine interaction and machine-to-machine communication
- Human, social, societal, ethical, legal, and environmental aspects
- Regulation and certification
- Case studies, experience reports, benchmarking, best practices, and worst practices (e.g., war stories illustrating important anti-patterns)
- New ideas, emerging results, vision papers, and roadmaps
- Robotics, autonomous driving, NLP, digital assistants, and recommendation systems
Guest editors of this theme issue particularly invite practitioners from industry to contribute, as articles presenting results about industrial applications will be preferred and will be judged on their industrial impact.
Timeline
Submission deadline: 30 July 2021
Publication: March 2022
Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be original work that has not been submitted to another publication. Submissions should follow the IEEE Computer Society requirements (https://www.computer.org/publications/author-resources/peer-review/magazines) and consist of the following:
- A manuscript of maximum 6,000 words: A PDF of the complete manuscript layout with figures and tables placed within the text. Each figure and table is counted as 300 words.
- A source file in Word or Latex format.
- High-resolution photos and graphics such as JPEG files.
Articles that have been previously published at a conference need to have, at least, 30% new material. Manuscripts need to be submitted online at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee. Select this special issue in Step 1 of the submission process to ensure that the article is reviewed for this special issue.
Questions?
Contact the guest editors at co3-22@computer.org.
Guest editors:
- Atif Mashkoor, LIT Secure & Correct Systems Lab, Austria
- Tim Menzies, North Carolina State University, USA
- Alexander Egyed, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
- Rudolf Ramler, Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria
