EnviRE'21 is now over. The workshop attracted around 20 participants throughout the day. Thanks to the authors, presenters, and participants for making EnviRE'21 an interactive and successful event! Special thanks go to Shaukat Ali for his keynote! We plan to keep our interests and conversations alive, and organize future events for the community to get together. Here's the link to the Google Doc during EnviRE'21. Many questions and discussion points arise. We welcome you to send us your ideas and comments. Thank you!
No matter what machine the software engineers build, the requirements are located in the environment" [Jackson'97]. This environment is part of the real world in which the machine is installed and the machine's effect is observed and evaluated. The re-emergence of AI (especially the black-box deep learning solutions) and the unstoppable penetration of AI-based systems across industries, public sectors, and all walks of life make it important and timely for the requirements engineering (RE) community to discuss the role of environment in driving various activities: elicitation, modeling, implementation, testing, deployment, and evolution. With the machine becoming more intelligent and embedded, the environment is more open and dynamic. The workshop objectives are to bring the interested researchers and practitioners together, exchange ideas and visions, and explore a set of open problems to pursue in the years to come.
We want EnviRE'21 to be a truly workshop. In particular, we plan to take advantage of RE'21 going virtual and have our workshop participant work in breakout sessions within smaller groups on a set of pre-defined RE activities focusing on environmental assumptions: eliciting everyone's workshop participation constraints imposed by their environments, and then testing the conference system (Clowdr) in satisfying (or satisficing) the participants' environmental constraints. The anticipated outcomes of the EnviRE'21 workshop will include not only the keynote and working paper presentations, but also the concrete results from the breakout sessions documenting environmental assumptions and how well they are addressed by Clowdr. All results will be made publicly on the workshop website, with Clowdr-related results made aware of to the Clowdr team. [top]
8:00am-8:15am Opening
8:15am-9:30am Keynote: Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Requirements Optimization, Learning, and Evolution for Cyber-Physical Systems by Shaukat Ali
9:30am-9:45am Break
9:45am-10:30am Paper presentations & discussion (15 minutes per paper)
[Download the one-page Call for Papers in PDF format: here.]
Modeling the environment will be more and more important in RE when the systems will situate in the open world and with the human in the loop. For example, IoT-enabled systems, cyber-physical systems, AI-based systems, etc. are expected to be able to perceive the changes of an open and dynamic environment, respond to changes through architectural transformations, and exhibit context-aware, adaptive, and trustworthy behaivors.
Specifically for the AI-based systems, the components built by machine learning in fact are black boxes. It is not possible to structuring their functions by examining their architectures (consisting of a hierarchical neural networks). Their functions can only be represented by the effects imposed on their operational and interacting environment. These effects can in turn define the tasks of model training, validation, testing, deployment, and operation. When mapping the requirements into the environment properties or assertions, the benefits include natural decomposition and structuring of the problem. The "Environment-Driven Requirements Engineering" workshop thus solicits position and short papers (up to 4 pages each; if more space is needed, please request by emailing the organizers) to provoke the discussions about:
Meanwhile, emerging topics are encouraged and the workshop will also have a breakout session allowing the participants to work on eliciting and reasoning about environmental constraints of the Clowdr system (the virtual conference system of RE'21). [top]
Please refer to the RE'21 page for formatting instructions, and submit your workshop papers to: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=envire2021 [top]
All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (Standard Time). [top]
Tanmay Bhowmik, Mississippi State University, USA
Xiaohong Chen, East China Normal University, China
Xavier Franch, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Zhi Li, Guangxi Normal University, China
Tao Yue, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China