Call for Papers: Special Issue on Human-Centric AI for Software Engineering

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping nearly every facet of software systems — from how we design, test, and deploy them, to how they are maintained and evolved. While AI-driven capabilities promise to dramatically improve software quality and developer productivity, they also raise fundamental challenges: explainability, trust, fairness, human oversight, control, and accountability. These challenges are inherently human-centric: software engineers, users, and stakeholders interact with AI systems, make decisions based on them, and must understand their behavior.

In the context of software engineering, a human-centric perspective on AI is essential. When we embed AI components inside software development pipelines or products, we are not merely building smart code — we are co-creating socio-technical systems. The human actors (developers, testers, operators, end users) shape, adapt to, and are affected by these systems. Ignoring human aspects can lead to misaligned goals, a lack of user trust, unintended behaviors, or systemic failures.

This special issue of IEEE Software invites high-quality contributions exploring the intersection of AI, software engineering, and human-centric design. We welcome papers from two complementary angles: (1) Human-centered AI, focusing on how humans understand, collaborate with, and shape AI within software engineering workflows; and (2) AI for humans, highlighting how AI can support, augment, and empower developers, testers, operators, and end users.

Submissions should emphasize how software engineering methods, tools, and processes can be designed or adapted to preserve human agency, understanding, oversight, and participation when building or using AI-enabled systems —keeping human needs and roles central, rather than addressing trustworthiness or technical properties in isolation. Contributions addressing both developer-focused human-AI topics and end-user-focused interaction and co-creation are encouraged.

We seek practical, experience-based, and research-grounded articles that address the integration of human-centric principles into AI for software engineering. Submissions should offer value to practitioners while being grounded in evidence, case studies, frameworks, tools, or reflections on real-world practice.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Explainable, interpretable, and transparent AI for developers, operators, and end users
• Human-in-the-loop and human-AI collaborative development tools
• Governance, safety, trust, accountability, and ethical alignment in AI-augmented systems
• Human factors, mental models, and developer experience with AI tools
• Fairness, bias mitigation, and inclusive AI system design
• AI-assisted requirements, design, testing, maintenance, and evolution
• Participatory design, co-creation, and multi-stakeholder collaboration in AI-enabled software
• Socio-technical ecosystems and organizational practices for human-centered AI
• DevOps/MLOps pipelines that embed human oversight and feedback
• End-User interaction with AI-augmented software features
• Human-AI co-creation for end-user development
• Empirical and longitudinal studies of AI in software engineering practice
• Education and workforce development for human-centric AI engineering

Submission Instructions:

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, visit the IEEE Software Author Information page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal system, and be sure to select the special issue or special section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.

In addition to submitting your paper to IEEE Software, you are also encouraged to upload the data related to your paper to IEEE DataPort. IEEE DataPort is IEEE's data platform that supports the storage and publishing of datasets while also providing access to thousands of research datasets. Uploading your dataset to IEEE DataPort will strengthen your paper and will support research reproducibility. Your paper and the dataset can be linked, providing a good opportunity for you to increase the number of citations you receive. Data can be uploaded to IEEE DataPort prior to submitting your paper or concurrent with the paper submission.