The rapid expansion of software development has significant environmental, technical, social, and economic impacts. Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 compels developers to adopt sustainable practices. Existing methods mostly offer high-level guidelines, which are time-consuming to implement and rely on team adaptability. Moreover, they focus on design or implementation, while sustainability assessment should start at the requirements engineering phase. In this paper, we introduce SEER, a framework which addresses sustainability concerns in the early software development phase. The framework operates in three stages: (i) it identifies sustainability requirements (SRs) relevant to a specific software product from a general taxonomy; (ii) it evaluates how sustainable system requirements are based on the identified SRs; and (iii) it optimizes system requirements that fail to satisfy any SR. The framework is implemented using the reasoning capabilities of large language models and the agentic RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) approach. SEER has been experimented on four software projects from different domains. Results generated using Gemini 2.5 reasoning model demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in accurately identifying a broad range of sustainability concerns across diverse domains.

Interaction-Oriented Programming (IOP) is an approach to building a multiagent system by modeling the interactions between its roles via a flexible interaction protocol and implementing agents to realize the interactions of the roles they play in the protocol. In recent years, we have developed an extensive suite of software that enables multiagent system developers to apply IOP. These include tools for efficiently verifying protocols for properties such as liveness and safety and middleware that simplifies the implementation of agents. This paper presents some of that software suite.

Machine Learning Enabled Systems (MLS) are becoming integral to real-world applications, but ensuring their sustainable performance over time remains a significant challenge. These systems operate in dynamic environments and face runtime uncertainties like data drift and model degradation, which affect the sustainability of MLS across multiple dimensions: technical, economical, environmental, and social. While Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) addresses the technical dimension by streamlining the ML model lifecycle, it overlooks other dimensions. Furthermore, some traditional practices, such as frequent retraining, incur substantial energy and computational overhead, thus amplifying sustainability concerns. To address them, we introduce HarmonE, an architectural approach that enables self-adaptive capabilities in MLOps pipelines using the MAPE-K loop. HarmonE allows system architects to define explicit sustainability goals and adaptation thresholds at design time, and performs runtime monitoring of key metrics, such as prediction accuracy, energy consumption, and data distribution shifts, to trigger appropriate adaptation strategies. We validate our approach using a Digital Twin (DT) of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), focusing on traffic flow prediction as our primary use case. The DT employs time series ML models to simulate real-time traffic and assess various flow scenarios. Our results show that HarmonE adapts effectively to evolving conditions while maintaining accuracy and meeting sustainability goals.

Context: A deeper understanding of human factors in software engineering (SE) is essential for improving team collaboration, decision-making, and productivity. Communication channels like code reviews and chats provide insights into developers' psychological and emotional states. While large language models excel at text analysis, they often lack transparency and precision. Psycholinguistic tools like Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) offer clearer, interpretable insights into cognitive and emotional processes exhibited in text. Despite its wide use in SE research, no comprehensive review of LIWC's use has been conducted. Objective: We examine the importance of psycholinguistic tools, particularly LIWC, and provide a thorough analysis of its current and potential future applications in SE research. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of six prominent databases, identifying 43 SE-related papers using LIWC. Our analysis focuses on five research questions. Results: Our findings reveal a wide range of applications, including analyzing team communication to detect developer emotions and personality, developing ML models to predict deleted Stack Overflow posts, and more recently comparing AI-generated and human-written text. LIWC has been primarily used with data from project management platforms (e.g., GitHub) and Q&A forums (e.g., Stack Overflow). Key BSE concepts include Communication, Organizational Climate, and Positive Psychology. 26 of 43 papers did not formally evaluate LIWC. Concerns were raised about some limitations, including difficulty handling SE-specific vocabulary. Conclusion: We highlight the potential of psycholinguistic tools and their limitations, and present new use cases for advancing the research of human factors in SE (e.g., bias in human-LLM conversations).

The handover (HO) procedure is one of the most critical functions in a cellular network driven by measurements of the user channel of the serving and neighboring cells. The success rate of the entire HO procedure is significantly affected by the preparation stage. As massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems with large antenna arrays allow resolving finer details of channel behavior, we investigate how machine learning can be applied to time series data of beam measurements in the Fifth Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) system to improve the HO procedure. This paper introduces the Early-Scheduled Handover Preparation scheme designed to enhance the robustness and efficiency of the HO procedure, particularly in scenarios involving high mobility and dense small cell deployments. Early-Scheduled Handover Preparation focuses on optimizing the timing of the HO preparation phase by leveraging machine learning techniques to predict the earliest possible trigger points for HO events. We identify a new early trigger for HO preparation and demonstrate how it can beneficially reduce the required time for HO execution reducing channel quality degradation. These insights enable a new HO preparation scheme that offers a novel, user-aware, and proactive HO decision making in MIMO scenarios incorporating mobility.

This paper demonstrates that simple features available during the calibration of a brain-computer interface can be utilized for source data selection to improve the performance of the brain-computer interface for a new target user through transfer learning. To support this, a public motor imagery dataset is used for analysis, and a method called the Transfer Performance Predictor method is presented. The simple features are based on the covariance matrices of the data and the Riemannian distance between them. The Transfer Performance Predictor method outperforms other source data selection methods as it selects source data that gives a better transfer learning performance for the target users.

This paper presents our findings on the automatic summarization of Java methods within Ericsson, a global telecommunications company. We evaluate the performance of an approach called Automatic Semantic Augmentation of Prompts (ASAP), which uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate leading summary comments for Java methods. ASAP enhances the $LLM's$ prompt context by integrating static program analysis and information retrieval techniques to identify similar exemplar methods along with their developer-written Javadocs, and serves as the baseline in our study. In contrast, we explore and compare the performance of four simpler approaches that do not require static program analysis, information retrieval, or the presence of exemplars as in the ASAP method. Our methods rely solely on the Java method body as input, making them lightweight and more suitable for rapid deployment in commercial software development environments. We conducted experiments on an Ericsson software project and replicated the study using two widely-used open-source Java projects, Guava and Elasticsearch, to ensure the reliability of our results. Performance was measured across eight metrics that capture various aspects of similarity. Notably, one of our simpler approaches performed as well as or better than the ASAP method on both the Ericsson project and the open-source projects. Additionally, we performed an ablation study to examine the impact of method names on Javadoc summary generation across our four proposed approaches and the ASAP method. By masking the method names and observing the generated summaries, we found that our approaches were statistically significantly less influenced by the absence of method names compared to the baseline. This suggests that our methods are more robust to variations in method names and may derive summaries more comprehensively from the method body than the ASAP approach.

Software systems are inherently complex. In addition, any ML model is, at its core, probabilistic in nature and hence, suffers from the challenge of uncertainty [2, 3, 4]. The complexity of a software system combined with the non-deterministic nature of an ML model can introduce variability - the phenomenon where a piece of software behaves differently when the development or the runtime environment changes although the internal software artifacts such as code, and input data are exactly the same. In practice it is very likely that development and deployment environments are different, hence, understanding how an ML model may behave differently after deployment compared to how it behaved in the development environment is a crucial aspect of AI-based software development. For example, an arbitrary face recognition system achieving an F1-score of, say 0.9, in the development environment does not guarantee that it will on average achieve a similar F1-score once deployed in a different environment configuration.

Capturing users' engagement is crucial for gathering feedback about the features of a software product. In a market-driven context, current approaches to collect and analyze users' feedback are based on techniques leveraging information extracted from product reviews and social media. These approaches are hardly applicable in bespoke software development, or in contexts in which one needs to gather information from specific users. In such cases, companies need to resort to face-to-face interviews to get feedback on their products. In this paper, we propose to utilize biometric data, in terms of physiological and voice features, to complement interviews with information about the engagement of the user on the discussed product-relevant topics. We evaluate our approach by interviewing users while gathering their physiological data (i.e., biofeedback) using an Empatica E4 wristband, and capturing their voice through the default audio-recorder of a common laptop. Our results show that we can predict users' engagement by training supervised machine learning algorithms on biometric data (F1=0.72), and that voice features alone are sufficiently effective (F1=0.71). Our work contributes with one the first studies in requirements engineering in which biometrics are used to identify emotions. This is also the first study in software engineering that considers voice analysis. The usage of voice features could be particularly helpful for emotion-aware requirements elicitation in remote communication, either performed by human analysts or voice-based chatbots, and can also be exploited to support the analysis of meetings in software engineering research.

The latest advancements in machine learning, specifically in foundation models, are revolutionizing the frontiers of existing software engineering (SE) processes. This is a bi-directional phenomona, where 1) software systems are now challenged to provide AI-enabled features to their users, and 2) AI is used to automate tasks within the software development lifecycle. In an era where sustainability is a pressing societal concern, our community needs to adopt a long-term plan enabling a conscious transformation that aligns with environmental sustainability values. In this paper, we reflect on the impact of adopting environmentally friendly practices to create AI-enabled software systems and make considerations on the environmental impact of using foundation models for software development.