Academic Life
On March 25 and 26, 2024, together with the researchers involved in the CyberExcellence project, the flagship research project of the IIS CyberWal by DigitalWallonia, we visited the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg.
On Wednesday November 29, 2023, we were invited to the 5th edition of the Dataweek, organized by Hénallux, to talk about artificial intelligence and software development. After a general introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs) and their use with ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot, we examined their concrete impact on developers’ daily lives. Starting from the observation that many of us share: “LLMs are good for producing code, ok, but what’s next?” we unpacked how this revolution was still only local. Yes, we generate bits of code, but are we ready to let LLMs tackle complete projects such as information systems? And by the way, what is programming really? Isn’t it basically specifying behavior in a structured way? In short, we’ve deconstructed the myth that AI threatens their jobs as developers. On the contrary, it’s redefining our roles and shifting the boundaries. Just as Emmet didn’t make webdesigners disappear, LLMs, represented here by ChatGPT, are not our enemies, but allies who are rewriting the rules of the development game. Ready to dive into this revolution?
Last November 2023, I took part in the Shonan seminar on the use of DevOps approaches for cyber-physical systems. It was an intense but interesting week, with 30 researchers from Japan, America and Europe, experts in software engineering, DevOps approaches and cyber-physical systems. In addition to the connections between research teams and future collaborations, the seminar helped to define a common vision of what a DevOps approach for cyber-physical systems is. This vision will be embodied in a book, to be written in the months following the seminar.
At the end of March 2023, the Initiation to the Scientific Approach course poster session was held in the Faculty of Computer Science entrance hall. The course aims to provide bachelor’s and master’s students with a basis for decoding, analyzing and designing a research question, as well as the experimental protocol to answer it. For their poster, the students had to analyze a research paper and present the experimental protocol defined in it. The teacher’s (Prof. Xavier Devroey) task was to discuss the 14 posters over 2 hours… The final result: mission accomplished for all! In the last lecture, Prof. Benoît Vanderose gave a much-appreciated seminar on the links between scientific method and critical thinking, in his very own style. Finally, the course was the subject of a presentation at the Grand banquet of inspiring pedagogical practices organized by the PUNCH team in May 2023, which made it possible to establish links with the BUMP library training team, who will intervene in the course this year 2023-2024 to give a seminar on bibliographic research.
Busy week for the SNAIL team at the International Conference on Software Testing (ICST) 2023! First presentation of his work by Martin Balfroid at the TestEd workshop. It was an opportunity to meet experts from the software verification and validation community and to discuss the latest advances in the field. Xavier Devroey presented a journal article describing the JUGE infrastructure for evaluating unit test generators in Java.
On February 10th, Professor Cynthia Liem from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands visited us at the Computer Science Faculty. This was an opportunity to talk about her research on verification and validation of machine learning models in different contexts and the fundamental questions this raises.
