Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Tiziana Margaria has joined Software (ISSN: 2674-113X) as an Editorial Board Member.

Prof. Dr. Tiziana Margaria is the Chair of Software Systems at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick. She is the Course Director and program co-director of the brand-new Immersive Software Engineering integrated B.Sc./M.Sc. program at UL. She leads research and education in advanced software systems and explainable AI. Her work spans from formal method-based approaches for high-assurance software in Lero, to the end-to-end interoperability of heterogeneous computing systems in advanced manufacturing in Confirm, and software solutions for rigorous and explainable AI and ML in the Centre of Research Training in AI. She co-leads and applies integrated healthcare in the UL Cancer Network and the Limerick Digital Cancer Research Centre. She is a Fellow and currently the Vice President of the Irish Computer Society, Vice President of the IFIP Working Group on Design and Engineering of Electronic Systems, and past President of the European Association for Software Science and Technology.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Anna Rita Fasolino has joined Software (ISSN: 2674-113X) as an Editorial Board Member.

Prof. Dr. Anna Rita Fasolino is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Napoli Federico II, Italy.

Her research interests are focused on software engineering with an emphasis on software testing, GUI and mobile app testing, reverse engineering, web engineering, and embedded software engineering. She has developed and participated in numerous R&D projects and co-authored more than 100 articles published in IEEE/ACM international journals, books, proceedings of conferences, and workshops.

In recent years, Prof. Dr. Fasolino has served as a member of the program committee and collaborated in the  organization of many international conferences, including IEEE ICST—International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability, IEEE ICSE—International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE INTUITEST, and IEEE INTUITESTBEDS. She is an Editorial Board Member of several scientific journals in this field, including the Journal of Systems and Software, Array, PeerJ Computer Science, and MDPI Computers.

Prof. Dr. Fasolino’s research and publications have received many citations in the research community, including at least 4900 Google Scholar citations and 2500 citations on Scopus. She has been granted distinguished awards at IEEE CSM 2002 and ICSM 2012 conferences for her work on web testing and automated mobile app GUI testing.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Welf Löwe has joined Software (ISSN 2674-113X) as an Editorial Board Member. 

Prof. Dr. Welf Löwe (http://welf.se/) is the head of research in Computer Science at Linnaeus University (Lnu, https://lnu.se/), Sweden. 

He studied computer science at TU Dresden, Germany, and received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from TH Karlsruhe, Germany, before he became a full professor at Lnu in 2002.

His research addresses software analysis and building technologies including Big Data and AI, quality assessment of software and technical documentation, design pattern detection and architecture recovery for software comprehension, context-aware composition and parallelization for software optimization, and garbage collection and pointer analysis as foundations. 

He is the founder and director of the Linnaeus university center for “Data Intensive Sciences and Applications” (DISA, https://lnu.se/en/disa), a research excellence center at Lnu. It focuses on research related to multidisciplinary Big Data and AI in engineering, sciences, and the humanities. He also directs an affiliated industry graduate school (DIA, https://lnu.se/en/dia) for applied research in these fields. 

He is a member and currently the secretary of the IFIP working group 2.4 "Software Implementation Technology".  

He is a co-founder of several companies that commercialize relevant research results including Softwerk (https://softwerk.se/) building advanced software systems and compilers, DueDive (https://duedive.com/) analyzing IT companies and their software, and Aimo (https://aimo-fit.com/) applying computer-vision-based movement analyses.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Manuel Mazzara has joined Software (ISSN 2674-113X) as an Editorial Board Member.

Prof. Dr. Manuel Mazzara is a professor of Computer Science at Innopolis University (Russia) with a research background in Software Engineering, Service-Oriented Architecture, concurrency theory, formal methods, and software verification. He published many relevant and highly cited papers, in particular in the field of Service Engineering and Software Architectures. Manuel received a Ph.D. in computing science from the University of Bologna, Italy, and has collaborated with European and US industries, plus governmental and inter-governmental organizations such as the United Nations, always at the edge between science and software production. The work conducted by Dr. Mazzara and his team in recent years focuses on the development of theories, methods, tools, and programs covering the two major aspects of Software Engineering: the process side, related to how we develop software, and the product side, concerning the results of this process.

Currently, Dr. Mazzara is the director of the Institute of Software Development and Engineering and the Head of the International Cooperation Office at Innopolis University.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Kari Smolander has joined Software as an Editorial Board Member.

Kari Smolander is a Professor of Software Engineering at the School of Engineering Science, LUT University, Finland, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland. He is the Head of the Software Engineering Department at LUT University, which is a major research and education unit of Software Engineering in Finland, with 60 researchers in the area. He has a Ph.D. (2003) in Computer Science from LUT University and a Licentiate (1993) from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has also worked in the Finnish software industry and has built software products for the global market.

Kari Smolander has published more than 200 refereed research papers in international journals and conferences, with more than 5200 citations in Google Scholar. He has served as a program chair in various workshops and conferences, such as EuroSPI, ICSOB and IWSIB, and a committee member in tens of different conferences. He has supervised 17 doctors in Software Engineering and related areas. In addition, he has received five best paper awards from conferences and journals.

Kari Smolander’s current research interests include change in software and systems development practices and organizations. He is especially interested in how people work together to understand and build extremely complex artifacts, such as software and information systems. His recent research projects have concentrated on software-based platforms, ecosystems and integrations between systems and platforms. He has specialized in qualitative research in Software Engineering.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Claus Pahl has joined Software as an Editorial Board Member.

Claus Pahl is a Full Professor of software engineering at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, and the Dean of the Faculty. He received an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Braunschweig and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Dortmund. He has held academic positions at Dublin City University, the University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin and the Technical University of Denmark before taking up his position in Bolzano. He has been a visiting researcher and guest professor at universities in Oldenburg (Germany), Edinburgh (UK) and Shenyang (China).

From 2013 to 2016, he was the Principal Investigator and Cloud Architecture Area Leader of the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce IC4, a National Technology Centre that is operated between 3 universities and works together with more than 40 industry members. He has been involved as a member of the Executive Board for Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre (a National Research Centre with more than 150 researchers working across 7 universities) and acted as Director of the CloudCORE Cloud Computing Research Centre.

His research interests lie in the software engineering field, specifically focusing on software architecture. Service engineering and cloud/IoT architectures have served as a specific application context for his architecture research—looking into migration, architecture specification, dynamic quality and performance engineering. Currently, he works on the H2020 project 5G-CARMEN, where he investigates performance engineering aspects for edge cloud architectures.

He has published more than 300 journal and conference papers including all top cloud publications; has an h-index of 50 (according to Google Scholar) with more than 8000 citations; has chaired many international conferences in the software engineering and cloud technologies context, such as IEEE ECOWS, ICSOC, SOFSEM or CLOSER; and has been on seven journal editorial boards. He has been awarded more than EUR 5.5 million in research funding from national and international sources, involving both industry and academia. He has participated in the conference organisation of more than 150 events and has reviewed more than 35 journals. He has been an evaluator for research and innovation projects in nine countries across Europe, North America and Asia, and has reviewed many FP7 and H2020 projects for more than a decade. He has been an invited speaker and a panellist at events such as CLOSER, NC4, SE-CLOUD, WEBIST, ESOCC and HEANEt.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Hongyu Zhang has joined Software (ISSN: 2674-113X) as an Editorial Board Member.

Hongyu Zhang is currently an Associate Professor at The University of Newcastle, Australia. Previously, he was the Lead Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and Associate Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He received his Ph.D. degree from the National University of Singapore in 2003. His research is in the area of Software Engineering, in particular, intelligent software engineering, software analytics, maintenance, and reuse. The main theme of his research is to improve software quality and developer productivity by mining software data. He has published more than 180 research papers in reputable international journals and conferences and received four ACM Distinguished Paper awards. He has served as a program committee member/track chair for more than 80 software engineering conferences. He is general co-chair of ICSME 2020 and Associate Editor of the journal Automated Software Engineering. He was recognized as one of the world’s top 20 most prolific Software Engineering researchers (2013–2020) according to an independent Elsevier bibliometric assessment. He is a Distinguished Member of ACM, a Distinguished Member of CCF, a senior member of IEEE, and a Fellow of Engineers Australia (FIEAust). More information about him can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/hongyujohn.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Tadashi Dohi has joined Software (ISSN: 2674-113X) as an Editorial Board Member.

Dr. Tadashi Dohi has served as a Full Professor at Hiroshima University, Japan, since 2002. He is currently appointed as Dean of School of Informatics and Data Science and Associate Dean of Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University. He received a Doctor of Engineering degree from Hiroshima University in 1995.

His research interests include Software Reliability, Dependable Computing, Performance Evaluation, Operations Research. To date, his research has led to 260 journal papers, 320 peer-reviewed conference papers, 25 book editions, and 40 book chapters in the above research fields. Dr. Dohi is a Regular Member of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering (IEICE), Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), Reliability Engineering Association of Japan (REAJ), a Fellow Member of the Operations Research Society of Japan (ORSJ), and a Senior Member of IEEE (Computer Society and Reliability Society). He was acting President of REAJ in 2018 and 2019.

He has served as the General Chair of 15 international conferences, including ISSRE 2011, ATC 2012, DASC 2019, and ICECCS 2022. Of note, he was a founding member of the International Symposium on Advanced Reliability and Maintenance Modeling (APARM) and International Workshop on Software Aging and Rejuvenation (WoSAR). He has been a steering committee member in AIWARM/APARM, ISSRE, DASC, DSA. He has worked as a program committee member in several international premier conferences such as DSN, ISSRE, COMPSAC, SRDS, QRS, EDCC, PRDC, HASE, SAC, ICPE, among numerous others. He is an Associate Editor/Editorial Board Member of over 20 international journals, including IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, and Journal of Risk and Reliability.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Pekka Abrahamsson and Prof. Dr. Tommi Mikkonen have been appointed founding Editors-in-Chief of the new journal Software (ISSN 2674-113X, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/software).

Prof. Dr. Pekka Abrahamsson works as a full professor of information systems and software engineering at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He received his Ph.D. in software engineering in 2002 from the University of Oulu. Prior to his current position, he worked as a full professor at the Free University of Bozen Bolzano (Italy) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway). His research interests are in empirical software engineering, software startups, emerging software technologies, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. He is widely recognized for his academic achievements. He is a pioneer in research on agile software engineering methods and processes. Prof. Dr. Abrahamsson is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Arnetminer named him among the 100 most influential software engineering scientists in the world in 2016. Prof. Dr. Abrahamsson was awarded the Nokia Foundation Award 2007. He is also the co-founder of the Software Startup Research Network (SSRN).

Prof. Dr. Tommi Mikkonen is a full professor of software engineering at the University of Jyväskylä and a full professor of software systems at the University of Helsinki, both located in Finland. He received his Dr. Tech. in information technology in 1999 from Tampere University of Technology, Finland. In addition to his academic positions, he has been a principal scientist at Nokia and a visiting professor at Sun Microsystems Research and at Mozilla. His research interests include the IoT, software development methods, multi-device programming, and software engineering for AI. Prof. Dr. Mikkonen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and he has acted as a board member of the Finnish Information Processing Association. He is the year 2017 Open World Hero, nominated by the Center of Open Source Software in Finland.

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Pekka Abrahamsson and Prof. Dr. Tommi Mikkonen as the founding Editors-in-Chief of Software and look forward to Software achieving many milestones under their leadership. For further information on the journal’s aim and scope, please visit https://www.mdpi.com/journal/software/about.

We are currently recruiting Topical Advisory Panel Members for the journal Software (ISSN 2674-113X). The main responsibility of these individuals is to regularly provide support to Guest Editors, Reviewer Board Members, and Editorial Board Members (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/software/editors).

Software is a peer-reviewed, open access journal containing research on software engineering, published quarterly online by MDPI. The aims and scope of the journal can be found on the following website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/software/about.

The benefits of becoming a Topical Advisory Panel Member (TAP) include the following:

• Opportunity to publish one paper, with a certain discount, per year in Software, as well as potential discounts for additional papers you invite;
• Receiving a certificate in recognition of becoming a Topical Advisory Panel Member of Software;
• Software will offer additional sponsorships for conferences organized by Topical Advisory Panel Members;
• Travel grants of CHF 300–500 per year for conferences that you attend or organize.

The main responsibilities of the Topical Advisory Panel Members include the following:

• Providing regular reviews of manuscripts;
• Setting up at least one Special Issue (SI) in partnership with a senior researcher within two years of being appointed the role, and proposing a detailed strategy plan for the SI; the topic of the proposal is expected to be within the scope of the journal. The scope of the Special Issue should be broad enough to attract a reasonable number of submissions, but narrow enough to provide a cohesive collection of articles. The Special Issue should only cover a specific part of the scope of the journal;
• Providing a detailed strategy plan for the SI, including assisting in preparing the Special Issue/Topic titles, aim & scope, summary, and keywords; soliciting papers; promoting the SI;
• Providing support for the Special Issues/Topics related to your expertise when the Guest Editor(s) is/are not available. This includes SI promotion via social media and providing advice on some scientific cases;
• Promoting the journal at conferences (adding 1–2 slides into your presentation, distributing flyers, recommending the journal to your colleagues, etc.), on social media, and on other relevant platforms;
• Collaborating with the Editorial Board Members or the Editorial Office to promote high-quality/featured papers (for example, writing a summary or highlights of the Editor's selected papers). 

To qualify as Topical Advisory Panel Member, applicants must:

• Have expertise and experience in a field related to the journal;
• Be within approximately 10 years of receiving a Ph.D.;
• Have at least 6–8 published papers in the last 5 years, as a first author or corresponding author;
• Currently hold an independent research position in academia or a government institute.

If you are interested in this position, please apply via the following link to apply: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/software/topical_advisory_panel_application, or send an email to software@mdpi.com with your academic CV. We look forward to hearing from you!