Engineering Digital Systems for Humanity: a Research Roadmap
Marco Autili, Martina De Sanctis, Paola Inverardi, Patrizio, Pelliccione

TL;DR
This paper advocates for integrating human, societal, and environmental considerations into digital system engineering, proposing a research roadmap addressing macro challenges and technological issues across development, requirements, design, and validation.
Contribution
It introduces a comprehensive research roadmap emphasizing human-centric, societal, and environmental factors in digital system engineering, expanding beyond traditional technical focus.
Findings
Identifies four roles humans play in interacting with digital systems.
Highlights macro and technological challenges in human-system interaction.
Proposes research directions across development, requirements, design, and validation.
Abstract
As testified by new regulations like the European AI Act, worries about the human and societal impact of (autonomous) software technologies are becoming of public concern. Human, societal, and environmental values, alongside traditional software quality, are increasingly recognized as essential for sustainability and long-term well-being. Traditionally, systems are engineered taking into account business goals and technology drivers. Considering the growing awareness in the community, in this paper, we argue that engineering of systems should also consider human, societal, and environmental drivers. Then, we identify the macro and technological challenges by focusing on humans and their role while co-existing with digital systems. The first challenge considers humans in a proactive role when interacting with digital systems, i.e., taking initiative in making things happen instead of…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSystems Engineering Methodologies and Applications
