Session: May 25, 2019, 9:15 – 10:30

Title: “A Balancing Act: Carving a Space for Intentional Research in Mobile Software Engineering”

Keynote Abstract: Over the past couple of decades, mobile computing has elicited quite particular research challenges that demand novel innovations in mobile software engineering. Historically, research in mobile software engineering has balanced application demands on one hand with device and networking constraints on the other hand. As a result, researchers in the mobile software engineering field are something of “renaissance researchers”, with wide ranging expertise in classical software engineering, systems, applications, networking, embedded systems, and even machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, we as researchers in mobile software engineering tend to operate in a “reactive” mode. We “react” to the demands of new mobile applications by creating new libraries and programming APIs. We “react” to innovations in mobile operating systems by creating new methodologies and tools to support them. And we “react” to novel capabilities of devices and networks by creating expressive middleware to make these functions accessible to applications. In this talk, I motivate the need for a shift from a purely reactive style of research to a more intentional one. I will present a vision of a world in which the mobile software engineering community can leverage its diverse collective expertise to drive innovations outward rather than simply serving as a bridge between other communities. The talk will outline both the challenges in doing so and the potential benefits to our community.

Christine Julien

The University of Texas at Austin

Bio: Christine Julien is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Her research is at the intersection of pervasive computing and software engineering, investigating programming abstractions, middleware, models, and tools that ease the programming burden in these complex, dynamic, and unpredictable environments. She has published more than 130 conference and journal publications in her career. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Department of Defense, Freescale Semiconductors, Google, and Samsung. In 2004, Dr. Julien earned her D.Sc. in Computer Science from Washington University in Saint Louis. She earned her M.S. degree in 2003 and her B.S. with majors in Computer Science and Biology in 2000 (both also from Wash. U.).