Abstract

In this talk we will focus on a new research area coined as NeuroSE – neuroscience – based software engineering, with a special emphasis on code review and code understanding. Code review is an essential practice in software engineering to spot code defects in the early stages of software development. Reviewers may encounter mentally demanding challenges during the code review, such as code comprehension difficulties or distractions that might affect the code review quality. We will provide an overview of the NeuroSE area and the motivation for using surrogates derived from the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system to support code reviews, and discuss some recent developments by our team where we have proposed novel approach that evaluates the quality of code reviews in terms of bug-finding effectiveness and provides the reviewers with a clear message of whether the review should be repeated, indicating the code regions that may not have been well-reviewed.We will finalize the talk with some open questions, such as code development with the support of LLMs, and future research directions in neuroSE.

Biography 

Paulo de Carvalho holds a Full Professor position at the University of Coimbra. He is the co-founder and co-coordinator of the Health Informatics Lab (LInC) at the University of Coimbra, devoted to the research of intelligent algorithms for medical applications with a focus on intelligent solutions for tele-medical management of chronic diseases and aging. His main scientific interests are intelligent biosignal processing, intelligent algorithms for medical applications and trustworthy AI in medicine. He raised over 65 million € in competitive funding inside LInC and published over 300 scientific papers with over 3700 citations and several patents. He was the Director of the Department of Informatics Engineering (2011-2013) and is since 2019 the Deputy Dean for Research at FCTUC until 2024. He is the Deputy Director of the Ethics Committee of UC. At the international level he coordinated the Working Group on eHealth and Health Informatics of the IFMBE between 2015 and 2023, and he coordinates the Digital Health Division of the IFMBE since its foundation in 2023. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal on Biomedical and Health Informatics.