Keynote speaker Prof. Athena Vakali

Quantified Self and Sensing Data Analytics

Bio: Athena Vakali [female] is a professor at the School of Informatics, Aristotle University, Greece, where she leads the Laboratory on Data and Web science. ( Datalab ). She holds a PhD degree in Informatics (Aristotle University), a MSc degree in Computer Science (Purdue University, USA), and BSc degree in Mathematics.

Her current research interests include Data Science topics with emphasis on big data and online social networks mining and analytics, human-centric applications and sensing analytics, and on online sources data management on the cloud, the edge and decentralized settings. She has supervised 12 completed PhD theses and she has been awarded for her educational and research work which is extended with mentoring and students empowerment (ACM, ACMW). Prof. Vakali has published over than 190 papers in refereed journals and Conferences and she is Associated Editor in ACM Computing Surveys Journal, in the editorial board of the “Computers & Electrical Engineering” Journal, and ICST Transactions on Social Informatics (her publications received over 9700 citations with hindex=41 according to google scholar). She has coordinated and participated in more than 25 research projects in EU FP7, H2020, international and national projects. She has served as a member in the EU Steering Committee for the Future Internet Assembly (2012-14) and she has been appointed as Director of the Graduate Program in Informatics, Aristotle University (2014-15). She has co-chaired major Conferences Program Committees such as : ACM Gender Equality Summit (Greek Chapter) 2022, PC co-chair at the ACM/IEEE Web Intelligence Conference 2019, the EU Network of Excellence 2nd Internet Science Conference (EINS 2015), 15th Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2014), 5th International Conference on Model & Data Engineering (MEDI 2015), etc. She has also served as Workshops co-chair and has been a member to numerous International conferences and Workshops.

Abstract: In recent years, we are witnessing extensive broadening of the Web towards Web of Things, Ubiquitous, and Mobile Computing. The Web of Things is multifaceted, touching upon fields from smart homes and smart cities to retail and digital health. Omnipresent sensored devices continuously track individuals’ activities, and nowadays the “quantified self” i.e. self-knowledge through numbers has become a default option. In this talk, we will unveil the untapped opportunities of the quantified self and sensing data analytics, focusing on a human-centric positive behaviour change technology. Specifically, we will explore the success factors of human-computer interaction in ubiquitous behaviour change technology and the heterogeneous aspects of user engagement in this emerging medium, compared to conventional metrics. We will also discuss the implications of different design choices for diverse user segments and pave the way for the sensing-based services personalization. To illustrate our points, we will present work in the field of personalised and adaptive goal-setting in personal informatics utilising data management processes and mining techniques common across. What have we learned along the way? Where is the future of the sensing data analytics heading

Keynote speaker Prof. Alexander Serebrenik

Gender and Software Development

Bio: Alexander Serebrenik is a full professor of social software engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. His work tends to involve theories and methods both from within computer science (e.g., theory of socio-technical coordination; methods from natural language processing, machine learning) and from outside of computer science (e.g., organisational psychology). The underlying idea of his work is that of empiricism, i.e., that addressing software engineering challenges should be grounded in observation and requires a combination of the social and the technical perspectives. Alexander has co-authored a book “Evolving Software Systems” (Springer Verlag, 2014), and more than 230 scientific papers and articles. He is actively involved in organisation of scientific conferences and is member of the editorial board of several journals. He has won multiple best paper and distinguished reviewer awards. Alexander is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Contact him at a.serebrenik@tue.nl.

Abstract:
Software is being developed for people and by people. So, it is not surprising that differences between the people developing software are reflected in how software is developed and what the resulting software looks like. Moreover, as software influences society and is influenced by it, we need to create better software to create a better society and we need to create a better software world to create better software. I am using the word ‘world’ here in a very broad sense to encompass groups of different sizes and scales, companies and open-source communities involving professional developers and people developing software who do not see themselves as developers, such as research engineers or accountants working with Excel.

In this talk I will provide an overview of our research of diversity and inclusion in software engineering, focusing on gender diversity. Given a long-standing association of women and communication mediation, we have conducted a series of studies relating gender diversity to presence of suboptimal communication patterns known as ‘community smells’, as well as comparing the results of the data analysis with developers’ perception. To get further insights in the relation between gender and community smells, we replicate our study focusing on the Brazilian software teams; indeed, culture-specific expectations on the behaviour of people of different genders might have affected the perception of the importance of gender diversity and refactoring strategies when mitigating community smells. Next, we shift the gears and taking the intersectional perspective we focus on specific experiences of two groups of women in software engineering: transgender women and veteran women.