2025-05-08 04:58:03
Thanks to its digital transformation, society depends on software. This is expected to bring important benefits but at the same time is accompanied by worrisome constraints. The societal role of software and its engineering is not new. Nor is their need to be sustainable. But what does it mean, really? And how far have we come with our research?
This talk wants to trigger reflection on the research being done, its impact and its true contribution to the complex and urgent problems posed by both society and our planet.
Patricia Lago is a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she leads the Software and Sustainability (S2) research group in the Computer Science Department. She has a PhD in Control and Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino and a Master in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, both in Italy. She is a member of the IEEE ICSA and ECSA Steering Committees, and the Steering Committee Chair of the ICT4S conference series. She has published in all major conferences and journals in her field.
Her passion in research is to create software engineering knowledge that makes software better, smarter, and more sustainable. Her philosophy is that research should be industrial-relevant and serve the final purpose of being applied in practice. To this end, her research specifically focuses on the “real’’ needs of practice by establishing collaboration with partners from both the private and public sectors.
Her research and teaching are about software architecture, sustainability, software design and modeling, software quality assessment. She is the initiator of the Computer Science Master Track in Software Engineering and Green IT, and the director of the Master Information Sciences. She co-founded the Green Lab, a place where researchers, students, and companies collaborate to measure the energy footprint of software solutions.
2025-05-08 04:25:29
At Amazon Web Services (AWS), our customers manage a diverse array of resources - databases, compute, storage, and analytics - all configured to meet their specific business, security, and governance needs. They often ask, “Have I configured these resources correctly?” This seemingly simple question led us on a fascinating journey of developing a domain-specific language (DSL) for defining configuration checking rules and proving that they are correct. Our goal was ambitious: create a language that’s easy to author, capable of proving rule correctness, and adaptable to AWS’s continuous evolution. The more we restricted our language, the more powerful it became. This realization brought new meaning to the phrase “less is more.”
Traditionally, proving correctness in software development is a burdensome task. Developers must define specifications without much guidance on their accuracy. Our domain-specific approach, however, turned this concept on its head. Instead of humans creating specifications for computers to check, we designed our system to generate potential specifications for humans to verify. Here’s how it works: our system automatically generates scenarios demonstrating when rules evaluate to true or false. These scenarios effectively create specifications. A security engineer can then review these cases, deciding whether the specification is valid or if the rule needs adjustment. This process of “automatically generating specifications” has revolutionized how we approach configuration rule checking at AWS.
The restrictiveness of our domain-specific language, far from being a limitation, became its strength. By narrowing our focus, we gained the ability to prove correctness more efficiently and effectively than ever before. This approach eased the burden on our developers and led to provably correct configuration checks. Our experience with this DSL at AWS has reinforced a valuable lesson: in the right context, specialization can outperform generalization, especially when it comes to proving correctness. By focusing on the specific needs of AWS configuration checking, we’ve created a tool that’s not just more efficient, but fundamentally more capable of ensuring our customers’ resources are configured correctly.
Bio: Neha Rungta is a Director of Science in AWS. Neha is a world-renowned expert in developing and applying automated reasoning techniques to industrial systems. Neha’s work in AWS has broken new ground in the scale of automated reasoning applications. She has launched security services such as Amazon S3 Block Public Access, IAM Access Analyzer, and now, the Cedar language and Amazon Verified Permissions. Before AWS, Neha was a Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center where she verified the correctness of unmanned space systems and conflict detection algorithms used in commercial aircraft.
2025-05-06 22:19:54
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Alvin Wang Graylin, Global VP of Corporate Development at HTC. Alvin is also Chairman of the Virtual World Society, Vice-Chair of the Industry of VR Alliance, and President of the Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance. Alvin is a leader in the virtual and augmented reality industries. As a serial entrepreneur, he founded four venture-backed startups across sectors including AI-driven conversational search, mobile social networks, ad tech, and big data AI analytics, spanning both China and the U.S. As an active investor, he funded more than 100 startups and played a pivotal role in the establishment of HTC’s ViveX Global VR accelerator and SOSV’s mobile internet investment incubator. A frequent keynote speaker at leading international conferences, Alvin is regularly featured in major media outlets, where he provides thought leadership on immersive computing (AR/VR/MR), AI, entrepreneurship, venture investing, and the Chinese market. His latest book, Our Next Reality, examines how AI and XR convergence will reshape society. He holds an M.S. in CS specializing in AI from MIT, an M.S. in Business from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, focusing on VR, AI, and CPU architecture.
Alvin describes his early introduction to technology and computers after immigrating to the U.S. from China and later working at the first VR-focused research lab outside the military at the University of Washington. He highlights some of his pioneering contributions to the consumer PC, mobile, and internet industries in China, including helping establish Intel’s China office. Alvin explains how his background in NLP and AI helped him navigate and address the complexities of Chinese as a language for mobile search and shares some milestones from his work in China, at companies he founded and later at HTC. He touches on the early challenges and limitations of VR, progress made, and its exciting future promise. He also discusses some major advancements in XR technology, its transformative potential for education, and explains the synergy between AI and XR and the need for positive adoption at this pivotal moment in technological history.
2025-05-06 21:45:06
Since retiring from the National Science Foundation in 2011, Carl E. Landwehr has served in many positions, most recently as Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and lead research scientist at the Cyber Security and Privacy Research Institute, George Washington University. His interests include cybersecurity and trustworthy computing. Landwehr is recognized for developing and leading cybersecurity research programs at many institutions, including the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Among his honors, Landwehr received ACM SIGSAC's Outstanding Contribution Award, was inducted into the National Cybersecurity Hall of Fame, and made a Fellow of IEEE. He was recently selected as the recipient of the Computing Research Association’s Distinguished Service Award.
You can read the full interview at https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2025/carl-landwehr
The People of ACM series highlights the unique scientific accomplishments and compelling personal attributes of ACM members at the forefront of advancing computing as a science and a profession. These bulletins feature ACM members whose personal and professional stories are a source of inspiration for the larger computing community.
To read more People of ACM interviews, visit: https://www.acm.org/membership/people-of-acm.
2025-04-30 21:49:26
Jean-Yves Marion discusses "Ransomware: Extortion Is My Business," a Research Article in the May 2025 CACM.
2025-04-30 21:46:19
Annalu Waller and Tom Griffiths discuss "'What I Think about When I Type about Talking': Reflections on Text-Entry Acceleration Interfaces," a Research Article in the May 2025 CACM
