Miryung Kim: Re-engineering Software Engineering for a Data-centric World
Abstract: With the development of big data, machine learning, and AI, existing software engineering techniques must be re-imagined to provide the productivity gains that developers desire. This talk will review emerging roles of data scientists and the tools they need to build scalable, correct, and efficient software for a data centric world.
Kim will present a large-scale study of about 800 data scientists in collaboration with Microsoft Research, which looked at data scientists’ educational background, problem topics that they work on, tools they use, and activities. From the gathered data, she has identified nine distinct clusters of data scientists and best practices and challenges faced by each cluster.
In the second half of this talk, she will discuss the needs of re-targeting SE research community’s directions to address new challenges in the era of data-centric software development. In particular, she will detail some examples of her group’s work that re-invents debugging and testing for big data distributed systems such as Apache Spark. She will conclude with open SE problems in ML and heterogeneous computing that support data-centric software development.
Miryung Kim is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and is a Director of Software Engineering and Analysis Laboratory. She is known for her research on code clones — code duplication detection, management, and removal solutions. Recently, she has taken a leadership role in defining the emerging area of software engineering for data science.
She received her B.S. in Computer Science from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2001 and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2003 and 2008 respectively. She ranked No. 1 among all engineering and science students in KAIST in 2001 and received the Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology Award, the highest honor given to an undergraduate student in Korea. She received various awards including an NSF CAREER award, Google Faculty Research Award, and Okawa Foundation Research Award. She was previously an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is funded by National Science Foundation, Air Force Research Laboratory, Google, IBM, Intel, Okawa Foundation, and Samsung and currently, she is leading a 4.9M Office of Naval Research project on synergistic software customization. She is a Program Co-Chair of the IEEE 35th International Conference on Software Evolution and Maintenance and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and Empirical Software Engineering.
Webpage: http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~miryung/
Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou: The Human Dimension of Cloud Computing
Abstract: Cloud computing has become the typical way to deliver enterprise applications. As today’s cloud infrastructure becomes more and more complex with hybrid cloud as well as AI and advanced data processing integrated in the platform, human errors has become one of the major causes of failures in cloud and Internet systems, as reported by many system vendors and service providers. While various fault tolerance and recovery mechanisms are useful in handling hardware and software failures, they are less effective in handling system administrators’ human errors. The very recent outage in Facebook on March 13th, 2019 was also caused by a server configuration error, affecting millions of users. In addition to reliability, configuration errors also can lead to security issues. OWASP reports misconfiguration as one of the top 10 most critical web security risks. In 2017, a configuration error of Amazon S3 storage exposed personal information of 200 million users. In this talk, I will focus a few current challenges on the human dimension of cloud computing and management. Due to legacy and various other reasons, most today’s data center system management requirement (in particular system configuration) do not follow the primary design principles of human-computer interaction (HCI), namely (i) simplicity, (ii) feedback, and (iii) consistency, making cloud management error prone for system admins.
YY Zhou is a Qualcomm Chair Professor in Mobile Computing at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) since 2009. Her area of expertise includes computer reliability, data center management, and mobile systems. She obtained her MS and Ph.D from Princeton University. She is an ACM Fellow (2013) and IEEE Fellow (2015), Sloan Research Fellow (2007) and the winner of ACM Mark Weiser award (2015). She is always proud of her former and current Ph.D students, six of whom have joined top universities as tenured or tenure-track faculty. In parallel to her academic career, she has also co-founded three companies, with the first two successfully acquired by public companies such as VmWare. Since 2014, she has been busy with her third startup, Whova. It has gained substantial customer traction worldwide and has helped more than 8000 conferences/events in 85 countries, providing her deeper insights in understanding mobile app and web app development process and its unique challenges.
Webpage: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~yyzhou/
Mathieu Nayrolles: Automated Debug & Profiling of AAA Games
Abstract: Producing AAA games takes a lot of effort and organization. The production pipeline used at Ubisoft for its major brands like Rainbow Six, Assassin Creed or Far Cry is in constant evolution to produce bug-free games for our millions of players and support the game as a service (GaaS) paradigm that is currently transforming the video-game industry. This talk will present how we have automated our debug and profiling activities using known techniques from the software as a service world, landmarks of the SE scientific literature and our own research. This talk will also present the problems we are currently tackling, in partnership with our research lab (Ubisoft La Forge), Mozilla and several Canadian universities (Concordia, Polytechnique Montreal, ETS, McGill), to further automate our production pipeline.
Mathieu Nayrolles has ten years of experience in software quality and productivity. He obtained an M.Ing Soft. Eng. from CESI (France), an MS.c Comp. Sci. from UQAM (Canada) and a Ph.D. ECE from the Intelligent System Logging and Monitoring lab from Concordia (Canada) in 2018. He’s now a Technical Architect at Ubisoft Montreal where he leads a team of engineers that focuses on improving the productivity of the thousands of Ubisoft developers scattered around the world. He presented at various international conferences such as SANER, MSR, WCRE or CPPCON. He also wrote various books on open-source technologies such as Angular, Solr or Magento.