Software systems we can trust
We work on two complementary aspects of the same problem: using artificial intelligence to automate software engineering, and using software engineering to make AI-enabled systems dependable enough to rely on.
About the group
Software runs everything. The hard question is no longer whether it works, but whether we can show that it does.
The is the research group of Prof. Lionel C. Briand at Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software, in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick.
Our goal is to develop automated means of ensuring that software systems — including those built on AI — are reliable, secure and safe. That covers automated testing and analysis, fault localisation and repair, runtime monitoring, and the evaluation of the AI systems now being used to write software.
We care about solutions that survive contact with practice. Most of our projects begin with a problem brought by an industrial partner and are evaluated in that setting, so scalability and integration cost are treated as research constraints rather than as future work.
The group works closely with the Nanda Lab at the University of Ottawa, which Prof. Briand also directs.
What we work on
Research directions
Four strands, closely connected: each one tends to produce the problems the others end up solving.
Who we are
The group
A small team of researchers working across testing, program analysis, machine learning and empirical software engineering.
Our sister laboratory in Ottawa is named Nanda — “a quest for knowledge” in the Algonquin language.