Machine Learning for Software Refactoring: a Large-Scale Empirical Study

Refactorings tackle the challenge of architectural degradation of object-oriented software projects by improving its internal structure without changing the behavior. Refactorings improve software quality and maintainability if applied correctly. However, identifying refactoring opportunities is a challenging problem for developers and...

Towards Engineering AI Software for Fairness: A framework to help design fair, accountable and transparent algorithmic decision-making systems

Algorithmic decision-making (ADM) is becoming increasingly prevalent in society, due to the rapid technological developments in Artificial Intelligence. ADM make substantially impactful decisions about people: diagnosing whether we have a disease, what news and which ads we get to see, whether we<br/>are eligible for a job, benefits, a college...

Evaluating the Quality of Opponent Models in Automated Bilateral Negotiations

Automated negotiation agents are agents that interact in an environment for the settlement of a mutual concern. An important factor influencing the performance of a negotiation agent is how it takes the opponent into account. The main challenge in this aspect, is that opponents typically hide private information to avoid exploitation. In such a...

Code Smells & Software Quality in Machine Learning Projects

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are pervasive in the current computer science landscape. Yet, there still exists a lack of Software Engineering (SE) experience and best practices in this field. One such best practice, static code analysis, can be used to find code smells, i.e., (potential) defects in the source code,...

Major incident detection

Incident management is one of the top priorities for IT companies. Within incident management the so-called major incidents, incidents with a severe impact on the company, require emergency actions to reduce this impact. An earlier detection of these major incidents will lead to a faster resolution time and this can be achieved by using software...