INVITE SPEAKERS
Dr. Emanuel S. Grant
University of North Dakota, USA
Speech Title: Towards Integrating Artificial Intelligence in Software Engineering at the Graduate Level of Education
Abstract: The ubiquitous use of software systems in new application domains has brought significant economic and technological benefits to the world’s nations. These benefits are mitigated by some of the costly software system failures over the decades. Many of these failures are caused by inadequate and inappropriate software development strategies. In the domains of mission- and safety-critical software system development, the use of appropriate development methodologies is required before such systems can enter production. The rationale for this research derives from observing that artificial intelligence (AI) is being applied at a pace that challenges the verification of its suitability to the domains of application. This situation arises from the proliferation of AI development being conducted from a data science point of view rather than from a software engineering (SE) perspective. This observation leads to the question of whether software development course curricula are addressing the necessary educational needs for graduates to respond to the challenges of applying AI development in emerging domains. The challenge has two parts: the first is the use of AI in developing software systems, and the second is the development of AI systems. The research will leverage the best practices from established learning theories, academic and industrial guidelines and standards, respectively, for education students in the development of safety-critical software system that incorporates AI in a beneficial and science-based approach. This research will make contributions to tertiary education by contributing to the use of established learning theories as the driver for designing and implementing course and program curricula rather than such courses and programs being driven by research topic interest. The thesis is that this approach will lead to students being more versed in formal learning theories that will accord more science-based approaches to problem-solving.
Biography: Emanuel S. Grant received a B.Sc. from the University of the West Indies, MCS from Florida Atlantic University, and a Ph.D. from Colorado State University, all in Computer Science. Since 2008, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science (August 2002 – June 2018) and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (June 2018 – present) at the University of North Dakota, USA, where he started as an Assistant Professor in 2002. He currently serves as the Associate Director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) and SEECS Graduate Program Director. His research interests are in AI integration into software development, software development methodologies, formal specification techniques, domain-specific modeling languages, model-driven software development, software engineering education, and ethics for software engineering.
Emanuel Grant has conducted research in software engineering teaching with collaborators from Holy Angel University, Philippines; HELP University College, Malaysia; III-Hyderabad, India; Singapore Management University, Singapore; Montclair State University, and University of North Carolina Wilmington of the USA; and the University of Technology, Jamaica. He is affiliated with the SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory) organization, as a member of the Essence - Kernel and Language for Software Engineering Methods (Essence) group. Emanuel is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
