Chair’s Message
Message To Our Members
The IEEE Computer Society is the world’s largest professional organization devoted to computer science and the TCSE (Technical Council on Software Engineering) is the voice of software engineering within the IEEE and the Computer Society. TCSE has the duty to advance awareness of software engineering and to support education and training through conferences, workshops, and other professional activities that contribute to the growth and enrichment of software engineering academics and professionals. This is your organization. It should serve you in terms of your professional growth, but it should also serve your business, your government, your financial environment, your health, your home and family, and your social networks.
Software is everywhere and is critical to the financial, environmental, physical, and social well-being of our world. As software engineers, we have incredible opportunities, and enormous responsibilities to society as a vibrant, multi-disciplinary, and rapidly expanding field. Consequently, the TCSE is in the privileged and also sensitive position to exert an enormous influence on the society. In the history of the TCSE we have been leaders in working with professional societies, governments, academia, non-profits organizations, and industries to create the resources and opportunities for educating and inspiring software engineers.
I am deeply honoured to be the Chair of the IEEE CS Technical Community on Software Engineering (TCSE). I take on this journey with gratitude for your support and with great excitement and strong commitment to serve our community in the best way. I am extremely grateful to be accompanied in this journey by an excellent Executive Committee composed of outstanding colleagues. I will put all my effort in serving the SE community to further enable the intellectual and personal growth of each one of its members, especially early career researchers who are vital to the future of the field. Besides, I plan to prioritise expanding the support that IEEE TCSE provides to SE events, increasing the synergy with industry, making in-person conference participation more environmentally friendly, and fostering an inclusive and diverse environment by introducing.
Biography
Dr Federica Sarro is a Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where she is the Head of the Software Systems Engineering group.
She has extensive academic and industrial expertise in Search-Based Software Engineering, Automated Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering and Software Analytics, with a focus on automated software management, requirements, testing, repair, and optimisation. On these topics she has co-authored over 100 papers regularly publishing in all the most prestigious SE conferences and journals such as ACM/IEEE ICSE, ACM FSE, IEEE ISSTA, IEEE RE, IEEE TSE, ACM TOSEM. She has given several invited talks at academic and industrial international events, and worked in collaboration with several companies including Meta, Google, Bloomberg, and Microsoft.
She has received 10 international awards for her research, including the ICSE’24 and FSE’19 ACM Distinguished Paper Awards, as well as several appreciations for her community service and high-quality work as a reviewer, including the ACM Distinguished Reviewer Award received at ICSE both in 2018 and 2020. In recognition of her “excellence in Software Engineering research with scholarly and real-world impact” she has received the IEEE TCSE Rising Star Award in 2021. In addition, she was awarded the prestigious LERO Parnas Fellowship in 2023.
Professor Sarro has served the SE community in numerous ways. She has been invited to be the Program Chair of seven international conferences including IEEE/ACM ASE 2023, IEEE ICSME 2021, IEEE/ACM ESEM 2020, IEEE ICPC 2019. She has been elected by the community to be on the Steering Committee of several events including ICSME, ESEM and ICPC. She has also been invited to serve in several Organizing Committees, including FSE, ICSE, RE, MSR. In addition, she has been Area Chair for ASE, Program Board member for ICSE, and Program Committee member of over 60 international events, and an Editorial and Reviewer Board member of prestigious journals including ACM TOSEM and IEEE TSE. She has been elected as ExCom member of the IEEE Computer Society (CS) Technical Community on Software Engineering (TCSE) for two consecutive terms (2021-2023 and 2024-2026); in this role she has co-chaired the IEEE TCSE Awards (which recognise internationally leading academics in several categories) and the Diversity & Inclusion Programme (which supports D&I activities within IEEE CS sponsored conferences and broader initiatives).