San Vigilio di Marebbe, Italy - February 1-8 2025
Meeting: February 1-8, 2025
Benoit Combemale University of Rennes 1, France
Antonio Bucchiarone Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Italy
Alfonso Pierantonio Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Italy
While software is revolutionizing the modern world, the modern world necessarily requires software engineering to keep the pace accordingly. Modern software-based systems operate under rapidly changing conditions and face ever-increasing uncertainty. These dynamics demand accelerated adaptability, or more precisely, temporal adaptability—the ability to adapt not only to a fixed set of variable requirements but also to an emerging sequence of changing requirements, often driven by incoming input data. This adaptability mirrors how humans handle uncertainty in dynamic environments, continuously updating their mental models to accommodate new information. As a result, the traditional boundary between engineering-time and execution-time is blurring, as is the distinction between software and the real world, which are increasingly fusing into a single fabric.
A key to addressing these challenges is recognizing that they fundamentally involve the creation, manipulation, and maintenance of abstractions. In cognitive science, abstractions are essential tools for managing complexity, allowing people to focus on the most relevant aspects of a situation. Similarly, in software engineering, abstractions are tailored for different stakeholders, each with varying cognitive capacities and needs, using different tools and techniques. These abstractions can vary in time: some are defined once and remain static, while others evolve dynamically, just as human understanding adapts over time in response to new experiences. Many of these abstractions are no longer explicitly crafted by experts but are implicitly constructed through learning or data-driven processes, much like the implicit learning that occurs in human cognition.
For instance, machine learning models generate new abstractions dynamically from data, akin to how humans form new mental models from patterns they observe. Meanwhile, historical data is used to build more static, pre-defined abstractions, which align with the cognitive process, where information is organized into manageable units.
Given the parallels between human cognition and software systems, it is of utmost importance for the future of software engineering that we broaden and redefine our understanding of abstractions. Abstractions must be designed not only to reduce complexity but also to be cognitively aligned with the needs of different users, minimizing cognitive overload while maximizing relevance. Furthermore, abstractions need to support both temporal adaptability and cognitive flexibility, allowing systems to evolve in response to new data, much like how humans adapt their mental models in real-time.
We call this process Abstraction Engineering, a discipline that emphasizes the engineering and evolution of abstractions across different contexts and stakeholders throughout the life cycle of a system (cf. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.14074 for a more comprehensive introduction). It recognizes that abstractions must be scalable, dynamic, and context-aware, reflecting both the complexity of modern systems and the cognitive needs of the humans who interact with them.
The meeting will be held at Hotel Monte Sella in San Vigilio di Marebbe (St. Vigil in German, Al Plan de Mareo in Ladin). A beautiful location for all those who enjoy the great outdoors in between the world-renowned Dolomites on one side and Kronplatz mountain on the other. High-quality skiing is possible on Kronplatz/Plan-de-Corones, with an infrastructure network and slopes among the most appreciated in Europe. In this unique environment, outdoor activities and the atmosphere of a mountain hotel will promote personal interaction and more open discussion of results by building more confidence among the participants.
4th Winter Modeling Meeting San Vigilio di Marebbe, Italy - February 1-8 2025
Hotel Monte Sella Via Catarina Lanz 7 I-39030 San Vigilio di Marebbe, Italy