Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Together with her students and collaborators, she seeks to understand how software tools, communication media, data visualizations, and social theories can be leveraged to improve how software engineers and knowledge workers explore, understand, analyze and share complex information and knowledge. She collaborates extensively with high-tech companies and non-profit organizations to ensure real-world applicability of her research contributions and tools.

Neil and Margaret-Anne as professors, spend much of their days (ok, a few hours here and there!) arguing about things they don’t really understand -- such as theories, research methods and what impact means to society. They are excited to jointly present this keynote and to engage the participants at SANER in what promises to be a provocative discussion about doing SANER research!

Dr. Neil Ernst is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Prof. Ernst and his students work at the intersection of software requirements and software design. His research leverages past experiences consulting with large government stakeholders. Current projects include analyzing software design discussions, technical debt in software, and engineering challenges in data science systems.

Neil and Margaret-Anne as professors, spend much of their days (ok, a few hours here and there!) arguing about things they don’t really understand -- such as theories, research methods and what impact means to society. They are excited to jointly present this keynote and to engage the participants at SANER in what promises to be a provocative discussion about doing SANER research!

Frank Leymann is a full professor of computer science at University of Stuttgart, Germany. His research interests include software architecture, robustness of highly- distributed applications, middleware, pattern languages, and quantum computing. Frank is co-author of more than 500 peer-reviewed papers, about 70 patents, and several industry standards. He is elected member of the Academia Europaea, a fellow of the center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology (IQST), Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) and Kurt Goedel visiting professor for quantum computing at TU Vienna. Before moving to university, he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and member of a small team responsible for the architecture and strategy of the whole IBM middleware stack.

Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Currently working for api7.ai. Also double as a trainer and triples as a book author.

Quantum computing is a new technology that recently raises a lot of interest in industry. We will sketch the essentials of this technology and its properties that make it so interesting for applications. But quantum computing is radically different from classical computing such that new approaches for building software that encompass quantum computing is needed. We will sketch such differences and suggest a first attempt of a lifecycle of quantum software. Also, some building blocks of a corresponding development environment and execution infrastructure will be discussed. Selective areas that demand significant research will be pointed to.

Quantum computers have the potential to solve certain tasks that would take millenia to complete even with the fastest (conventional) supercomputer. Numerous quantum computing applications with a near-term perspective (e.g., for finance, chemistry, machine learning, optimization) and with a long-term perspective (i.e., cryptography, database search) are currently investigated. However, while impressive accomplishments can be observed in the physical realization of quantum computers, the development of automated methods and software tools that provide assistance in the design and realization of applications for those devices is at risk of not being able to keep up with this development anymore. This may lead to a situation where we might have powerful quantum computers but hardly any proper means to actually use them. In this talk, we discuss how design automation can help to address this problem. This also includes an overview of corresponding software tools for quantum computers covering the simulation, compilation, and verification. For more details, please see https://iic.jku.at/eda/research/quantum/.

In the industry, it's always an interesting experience to notice the drop in productivity of developers working on the same application across years. Depending on which stage a feature is implemented, it can take double (or triple?) the time. As software rots, there comes a time when it's less expensive to rewrite the application from scratch. Organizations don't want to face this issue: maintenance of existing software is a hot topic among developers of all tech stacks. In this talk, I'll walk through some maintenance-related issues that I've faced in two decades working in different technical roles across various organizations and a couple of industries. I'll tell tales of sweat, tears, and blood. Don't expect a happy end!

Robert Wille is a Full and Distinguished Professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and Chief Scientific Officer at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria. He received the Diploma and Dr.-Ing. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Bremen, Germany, in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Since then, he worked at the University of Bremen, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the University of Applied Science of Bremen, the University of Potsdam, and the Technical University Dresden. From 2015 until 2022, he was Full Professor at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, until he moved to Munich. His research interests are in the design of circuits and systems for both conventional and emerging technologies. In these areas, he published more than 350 papers and served in editorial boards as well as program committees of numerous journals/conferences such as TCAD, ASP-DAC, DAC, DATE, and ICCAD. For his research, he was awarded, e.g., with Best Paper Awards, e.g., at TCAD and ICCAD, an ERC Consolidator Grant, a Distinguished and a Lighthouse Professor appointment, a Google Research Award, and more.

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, including Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, University of Toronto, University of Chicago, John Hopkins University, etc. 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 20,000 conferences/events in 105 countries, providing her deeper insights in understanding mobile app and web app development process and its unique challenges.

Gail C. Murphy is a Professor of Computer Science and Vice-President Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), as well as co-founder of Tasktop Technologies Incorporated. After completing her B.Sc. at the University of Alberta in 1987, she worked for five years as a software engineer in the Lower Mainland. She later pursued graduate studies in computer science at the University of Washington, earning first a M.Sc. (1994) and then a Ph.D. (1996) before joining UBC. Dr. Murphy's research focuses on improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by providing the necessary tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that matters most for their work. She also maintains an active research group with post-doctoral and graduate students.

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 have 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.