Our research seminar series.

18 Jun 2026

14:30–15:30

Bridging Academia and Industry: ITE Programs, Research, and Collaboration Horizons

Mohammad Saeed AbouTrab · Associate Professor at the Faculty of Information Technology Engineering, Damascus University

This seminar presents an overview of the Faculty of Information Technology Engineering at Damascus University — its academic structure, Master's and PhD programs, and active research directions. It highlights the Faculty's commitment to graduate employability …

17 Jun 2026

14:30–15:30

Understanding the Industry Perception of Ethics in the Software Development Lifecycle

Luciana Brasil Rebelo Dos Santos · Postdoctoral researcher at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

In this talk, I will introduce myself to the audience, telling a bit of my previous experience, and I will also show a preview of the paper I'll be presenting in July, at the Responsible Software Engineering workshop, co-located with ESEC/FSE 2026. In this pap…

27 May 2026

14:30–15:30

Simplicity by Obfuscation: Evaluating LLM-Driven Code Transformation with Semantic Elasticity

Lorenzo De Tomasi · PhD Student at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

Context: Code obfuscation rewrites source code into a functionally equivalent but less readable form. The goal is protecting proprietary software from reverse engineering and IP theft. Traditional techniques (layout, control flow, data transformations, identif…

22 Apr 2026

16:00–17:00

Towards LLM Agents for Model-Based Engineering: A Case in Transformation Selection

Zakaria Hacm · PhD Student at IMT Atlantique, Nantes (France)

In Model-Based Engineering, practitioners frequently face the challenge of selecting appropriate tools from a large number of options. LLM-based agents depend on Large Language Models to autonomously select and apply software tools to perform specific tasks. A…

24 Mar 2026

15:30–16:30

LLMs for Software Design Exploration: Architect's Augmentation or Replacement?

Andres Diaz-Pace · Full Professor at UNICEN University (Tandil, Buenos Aires, Argentina); Principal Research Fellow of CONICET (Argentina)

The exploration of software architecture alternatives is a key part of the architecture design process. In this context, LLM-based techniques — particularly agents — can help architects sift through large design spaces and perform a variety of analyses, extend…

18 Feb 2026

14:30–15:30

Optimising the Social and Environmental Sustainability of Stable Diffusion Models

Giordano d'Aloisio · Postdoc Researcher at SWEN (Università degli Studi dell'Aquila)

Text-to-image generation models are widely used across numerous domains. Among these, Stable Diffusion (SD) — an open-source text-to-image generation model — has become the most popular, producing over 12 billion images annually. However, the widespread use of…

1 Dec 2025

14:30–16:30

User Research Methods for Digital Experiences

Simone Bassanelli · Researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Trento (Italy)

A structured introduction to the main user research techniques applied to digital systems, gamified solutions, and games. The seminar illustrates how to integrate user research into an iterative design process, from defining goals to evaluating the final exper…

19 Nov 2025

14:30–15:30

Generative AI in Software Engineering: Ongoing research and emerging issues

Phuong Thanh Nguyen · Associate Professor at SWEN (Università degli Studi dell'Aquila)

The proliferation of disruptive large language models in recent years has enabled a plethora of applications across several domains. In software engineering, LLMs have shown remarkable capability in understanding and generating software artifacts. In our resea…

29 Oct 2025

14:00–15:00

Advancing Automated Ethical Profiling in SE: A Zero-Shot Evaluation of LLM Reasoning

Mashal Afzal Memon · Postdoctoral researcher at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used across diverse domains, yet their ethical reasoning capabilities remain unclear. This talk investigates whether LLMs demonstrate ethical reasoning capabilities and explores the possibility of automating ethica…

16 Sep 2025

14:30–15:30

Semantic Transformations vs. Iterative Repair: Handling Bugs with LLMs

Max Hort · MSCA Research Fellow at Simula Research Laboratory (Norway)

Two recent papers on applying large language models to software bugs. The first explored using semantic code transformations to improve defect detection, but found they were often unreliable and did not boost accuracy. The second focused on automatic program r…

18 Jun 2025

14:30–15:30

From Data to Decisions: Engineering Persona-Driven Tools for Smart Territories

Gennaro Zanfardino · PhD student at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

This talk presents a software engineering approach for supporting urban resilience and planning through data-driven, user-centered design. It introduces an open-source software ecosystem for territorial monitoring that integrates diverse data sources such as s…

7 May 2025

14:30–15:30

Energy-Aware Software: Designing and Evolving Greener Architectures

Roberta Capuano · Postdoctoral researcher at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

The ICT sector consumes around 4% of global electricity and contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. According to Gartner, over 74% of organisations have adopted microservices architectures — highlighting the importance of understanding how to de…

19 Mar 2025

14:30–15:30

Investigating AI for Software Performance Engineering

Federico Di Menna · PhD student at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

Performance is a critical non-functional aspect of modern software systems. Ensuring efficiency necessitates rigorous performance assurance throughout the entire software lifecycle, from early development to post-deployment. However, as system complexity conti…

19 Feb 2025

14:30–15:30

Engineering Fair and Efficient Learning-Based Software Systems

Giordano D'Aloisio · PhD student at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

The wide adoption of learning-based software systems (LBSS) - i.e., systems that include machine learning models - raises concerns about their quality. Among the most relevant and peculiar quality attributes of these systems is fairness, which identifies a sys…

29 Jan 2025

15:00–16:00

AI-agent COmmunities for software engineering: the EU MOSAICO project

Davide Di Ruscio · Full Professor at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

The application of LLM-based agents to Software Engineering requires a tremendous increase in their accuracy and minimisation of their bias. While LLMs continue increasing in size and performance, it seems that phenomena like hallucinations of a single agent a…

17 Dec 2024

14:30–15:30

Where Philosophy Meets Technology: Toward Better Modeling Tools

Alfonso Pierantonio · Full Professor at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), seamless integration of tools, languages, and processes is crucial for developing domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs). Effective tools must offer flexibility, support for co-evolution, and minimize complexity, includin…

20 Nov 2024

14:30–15:30

Ethics-based Negotiation in the Decision-Making of Autonomous Systems

Mashal Afzal Memon · PhD student at Università degli Studi dell'Aquila

The presence of autonomous decision-making systems is rapidly increasing, impacting many aspects of our daily lives. Designed to learn and act independently, these systems can make decisions on behalf of their users without human intervention. However, a major…