Genetic Improvement @ ICSE 2020

TL;DR

This paper summarizes discussions from GI-2020 @ ICSE, covering industry adoption, human factors, explainability, benchmarks, and the impact of COVID-19 on future research directions in genetic improvement.

Contribution

It provides an overview of recent topics and debates in genetic improvement, highlighting new challenges and perspectives discussed at the GI-2020 workshop.

Findings

Industry interest in genetic improvement is growing.

Explainability and human factors are key concerns.

COVID-19 pandemic influences future research and conference formats.

Abstract

Following Prof. Mark Harman of Facebook's keynote and formal presentations (which are recorded in the proceedings) there was a wide ranging discussion at the eighth international Genetic Improvement workshop, GI-2020 @ ICSE (held as part of the 42nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering on Friday 3rd July 2020). Topics included industry take up, human factors, explainabiloity (explainability, justifyability, exploitability) and GI benchmarks. We also contrast various recent online approaches (e.g. SBST 2020) to holding virtual computer science conferences and workshops via the WWW on the Internet without face-2-face interaction. Finally we speculate on how the Coronavirus Covid-19 Pandemic will affect research next year and into the future.