Lecture 10-2

Frontiers of SE

Lecture 10-2
Bart Massey 2015-12-02

Heads Up

  • Today we'll talk about frontiers of SE

  • The more things change...

  • SE can be done in weird ways

Frontiers Of SE: Machine Learning

  • Way to build SW systems without programming

  • Supposedly analogous to human / animal learning

  • Several successes

    • Backgammon play
    • Spam filtering
    • Speech recognition
    • Big data

Frontiers Of SE: Massive Parallelism

  • Way to bring much hard-to-use computing power to problems

  • Nothing new, but scaled a lot

  • Several successes

    • Go play
    • Climate modeling
    • Web services
    • Big data

Frontiers of SE: Proofs Of Software Security

  • Only sure way to defend a human adversary

  • Typically limited to specific properties

  • Several successes

    • Automatic software validators e.g. Coverity
    • SEL4 kernel

Discussion

  • SE is a huge field, but we are

    • Making progress: things are better than 20 years ago
    • Learning how to think about software
    • Carving up the field into more manageable chunks
  • Hard to say what the future will hold, but kind of neat

Last modified: Tuesday, 1 December 2015, 10:11 PM