Title:

The Future of Software Development: Predictions from people who have seen it, offered to those who will invent it

Abstract:

Together, Dr. Jennings and Mr. Joshua S. Allen have five CS degrees and over 50 years of industry experience in software development. Commercial software development is radically and rapidly changing, and they have observations and predictions to share. Many changes have been coming for decades, and AI is accelerating them. The role of higher education in the production of software will also change dramatically, but with great hysteresis and significant missteps along the way. Come hear their perspectives and bring your own. And remember, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, as Alan Kay and others have pointed out.

Bio:

Jamie A. Jennings earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University in 1995, then joined the faculty of Tulane University, where she established a robotics lab to continue her work on cooperative navigation and manipulation with mobile robots. In collaboration with her graduate and undergraduate students, this work included computational geometry, algorithm design, distributed systems and some applications of compiler design techniques.

Jennings left academia for a 19-year career in industry, first as a Research Staff Member at IBM’ss T.J. Watson Research Lab, then later as a Senior Technical Staff Member in IBM’ss Software Group (now called the Watson Cloud division). During this time, she led the creation of several open technical standards as the chair of Expert Groups in the SyncML Initiative, the Open Mobile Alliance and OSGi. She is the author of several software patents.

In August 2018, Jennings joined the NC State Department of Computer Science as a teaching faculty member, focused on undergraduate education. Her research interests are largely in applications of theoretical computer science. Working primarily with undergraduate researchers, she and her students apply techniques from Programming Language Theory, Compilers and the Theory of Computation (specifically, automata and grammars).

Jennings is the creator and primary author of the Rosie Pattern Language, a replacement for regular expressions that is designed to be used at industrial scale, where there are

1. Many expressions (patterns) in use
2. High data volume, velocity and variability
3. Many software developers involved in a project.

Host:

Kim Titus