Special issue on realizing artificial intelligence synergies in software engineering

Abstract

This special issue focuses on issues arising from the RAISE’12 Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering. Our objective is to provide a forum for researchers and industrial practitioners to exchange and discuss the latest innovative synergistic AI and SE techniques/practices. Why explore this combination of SE and AI? We think there are many answers to that question. As SE is asked to answer dynamic automated, adaptive, and/or large-scale demands, other computer science disciplines come to play. AI is one of them that may bring SE to further heights. Conversely, SE can also play a role to alleviate development costs and the development effort associated with AI tools. Such mutually beneficial characteristics have appeared in the past few decades and still evolve due to new challenges. That is, this special issue explores not only the application of AI techniques to software engineering problems but also the application of software engineering techniques to AI problems. This special issue is the result of much work that is still ongoing. As to future work, the RAISE series is also on-going. At the time of this writing, the RAISE’13 workshop has just completed (that event was sponsored by the United States National Science Foundation, and we thank them for their generous support). At that meeting, we saw much continued interest in this union of AI and SE. The reader should expect much novel and exciting work from this combination of ideas, in the very near future. And regarding the work seen to date, we hope that all the aforementioned papers will provide readers with some glimpse of the kind of work discussed at RAISE’12. Also, we would like to sincerely thank the reviewers for their assistance in the reviewing process.