Lisbon is a vibrant town with many nuances, reflecting its history and the transformation into a digital hub.
This is something the EU parliament has been recognized and the city has been acknowledged as the uprising star of the software industry, with a lot of new investments from, e.g. Microsoft and Amazon. It is understandable because the people living here and their mentality make it a perfect workplace. This can be seen by all the digital nomads working here and all the open space offices where you can rent a desk for a day or up to a year. Based on this you can understand why the program committee for The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) chose Lisbon to host the 46th version of the conference!
ICSE is one of the largest, if not the largest, conferences covering different topics related to software engineering. It attracts a lot of people from the US, because if you are a researcher there you more or less need to have a publication at ICSE. This is now also reflected in China, since a large amount of the attendees were Chinese.
Overall, there were approximately 500 presentations and workshops to choose between and an even larger amount if you include the co-hosted conferences. For example, Markus Borg from CodeScene presented one paper at one of those conferences. Our paper “Autonomous Monitors for Detecting Failures Early and Reporting Interpretable Alerts in Cloud Operations”, with Adha Hrusto as the first author, was placed in the Software Engineering in Practice track, which was one of several different tracks available to help you orientate and select among all the presentations.
The largest theme was AI, LLM and related topics and the presentations about different aspects of test and testing attracted a large amount of people. Interestingly and slightly surprisingly, the presentations about different social and psychological aspects of software engineering got a lot of attention from the delegates!
One of the presentations attended was about how you could localize and repair a neuron in a neural network instead of re-training the whole model, while another was about the performance of developers under the influence of cannabis. In other words, a very large variety of presentations and papers!
Even though the focus is on the presentations, we shall not forget about all the interesting meetings with people from all around the world. During coffee and lunch breaks, and at the social events you meet, discuss and exchange ideas. It is on these occasions you can get really good input and open up for future research ideas.
Next Year in Ottawa, Canada
Next year ICSE will be hosted in Ottawa, Canada and I recommend you visit it or, for example, The International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST).
These conferences focus on the latest research, while conferences like EuroSTAR have a more practical focus. Sometimes the speakers are not the most inspiring ones, but if you are interested in the latest trends and findings, this could be something to consider. It should be noted that the price for attending one of those conferences is almost a third compared to attending EuroSTAR.
If you are interested in reading more about the different presentations from ICSE24 you will find them here.
Perhaps you should submit something to ICSE25?