1st ACM International Conference on AI-powered Software (AIware)

“Software for all and by all” is the future of humanity. AIware, i.e., AI-powered software, has the potential to democratize software creation. We must reimagine software and software engineering (SE), enabling individuals of all backgrounds to participate in its creation with higher reliability and quality. Over the past decade, software has evolved from human-driven Codeware to the first generation of AIware, known as Neuralware, developed by AI experts. Foundation Models (FMs, including Large Language Models or LLMs), like GPT, ushered in software’s next generation, Promptware, led by domain and prompt experts. However, this merely scratches the surface of the future of software. We are already witnessing the emergence of the next generation of software, Agentware, in which humans and intelligent agents jointly lead the creation of software. With the advent of brain-like World Models and brain-computer interfaces, we anticipate the arrival of Mindware, representing another generation of software. Agentware and Mindware promise greater autonomy and widespread accessibility, with non-expert individuals, known as Software Makers, offering oversight to autonomous agents.

The software engineering community will need to develop fundamentally new approaches and evolve existing ones, so they are suitable for a world in which software creation is within the reach of Software Makers of all levels of SE expertise, as opposed to solely expert developers. We must recognize a shift in where expertise lies in software creation and start making the needed changes in the type of research that is being conducted, the ways that SE is being taught, and the support that is offered to software makers.

The 1st ACM International Conference on AI-powered Software (AIware 2024) will be hosted on July 15th-16th, 2024, at Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, co-located with FSE’24. AIware 2024 aims to bring the software engineering community together in anticipation of the upcoming changes driven by FMs and look at them from the perspective of AI-powered software and their evolution. AIware 2024 promotes cross-disciplinary discussions, identifies emerging research challenges, and establishes a new research agenda for the community in the Foundation Model era.

We are aware that the event dates for AIware and 2030 Software Engineering are conflicting. The organizers of the two events are coordinating the events’ programs, such that authors will have the opportunity to benefit from and participate in both. While a given paper can only be submitted to one of these events, the organizers, at their discretion, will align both events’ programs in order to allow cross-pollination between both communities.

Awards

ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards: given to the best full-length papers accepted in the research track.

Special Issues

Empirical Software Engineering journal: selected AIware papers will be invited to be revised and extended for consideration in a special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering journal by Springer.

Information about the FM+SE Vision 2030 event

The FM+SE Vision 2030 (https://fmse.io/), aimed to jumpstart the AIware community. And the turnout was fantastic! We had 108 attendees (57 from industry and 51 from academia), plus 50+ folks joining in via Zoom. It was a mix of a Dagstuhl with deep discussions and a school with great tutorials and industrial keynotes (around 4 tracks in parallel for two days). The active involvement of industry professionals brought a real-world perspective to the discussions, touching on the genuine pain points faced by practitioners today. Feel free to check out the program. the event recap video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isnj0x8-7sM , and our group photo here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/XWJvxgDpLgB9YEwn9

We hope you can join us at AIware 2024!