I have lived and worked in seven countries and my professional choices, retrospectively, may appear a little arbitrary. But they were actual decisions, admittedly based on partial and sometimes misleading information, but rational decisions nonetheless. Reflecting on what happened over the years, I can only realize the role of serendipity and how things could have gone very differently.
Very early in my career, I was sent to the U.S. by a French engineering company, ended up earning a PhD and lived in Maryland and the Washington D. C. Area for five years before receiving a green card (permanent resident) status. I really enjoyed my time in the U.S., both personally and professionally, where I began my research career. I could have returned to France or stayed in the US. However, I had a thirst for more adventure and found Canada to be a more liberal part of North-America, with a way of life and standard of living very similar to that of the U.S., with in addition the exception of francophone Quebec. At that time, being young and naive, I thought of myself as a citizen of the world and gave little importance to my roots. At this point in my life, I now know better and have also developed a great appreciation for Quebec culture and society.
I ended up doing a relatively short stint in Montreal and really liked the city. However, at that time Montreal and Quebec in general had a very limited high-tech industry—this has changed dramatically in the last 20 years—and the universities were suffering from deep budget cuts and thus severe underfunding. Serendipity struck again and I was offered a position as a department head at a Fraunhofer institute in Germany, a job for which I was barely qualified in a country I had never visited. What could go wrong? But I thought it was an exciting challenge and I was at the time already somewhat ambivalent about a career in academia and very much interested in industry-driven research.
My time in Germany was very formative. I worked with large German high-tech companies and learnt a lot. Managing a team of 20 (mostly) German scientists was very interesting, and I understood why the German economy was doing so well, which can be summed up by a great attention to details and quality, and the ability to effectively work in teams. But Germany was not home and, perhaps surprisingly, I missed Canada. Once I felt I had achieved a certain level of routine and learned what I could, it was time to go.
Upon deciding to return to Canada, I had to choose where to live. I wanted to focus on Ontario since research was much better funded in that province at the time. Being a city boy, I interviewed in Toronto/Waterloo and Ottawa, received job offers in both places, and chose Ottawa for mostly personal reasons, where I eventually held my first Canada Research Chair. Little did I know that this decision would have significant consequences 20 years later. Canada, at the time, was much better governed than it is today, its economy was doing well and its society was more cohesive. Over the years, Canada became my home and I truly felt that I belonged.
Like any Canadian academic, I was due for a sabbatical after seven years. Once again, I was eager to discover something new, both geographically and professionally. I ended up at Simula Research Laboratory, in Oslo, Norway. After my sabbatical, Simula asked me to return, this time for good, and I was in need of a new challenge. Although part of Europe, Norway was very different, a really beautiful country with an interesting culture. Simula was also a very exciting concept, a research centre focused exclusively on research and seeking close collaboration with industry. Similar to Fraunhofer, but with more degrees of freedom and better basic funding. At the time, the main industry there was the energy sector, oil/gas platforms and drilling ships, which relied on many complex, safety-critical systems. Once again, Simula was a very enriching professional experience in many ways, and Norway, although sometimes culturally challenging, gave me many personal insights. Over time, I was able to build a research centre, in collaboration with industry partners, focused on system verification and validation. But eventually, as before, Norway was not home and I thought about returning to Canada. Before I could do that, I was contacted by a newly created centre in Luxembourg, the SnT, about a research chair with generous funding and the opportunity to build a new department.
Although Luxembourg borders France, I was not familiar with the country. My family is from Brittany, and growing up in Paris, I had little knowledge of Lorraine in eastern France, to which Luxembourg is culturally similar. The research system in Luxembourg gave me incredible opportunities. For the second time, after the Fraunhofer IESE centre, I had the opportunity to contribute to the creation of a new centre. SnT was an environment, perhaps more than anywhere else, where I could do what I really wanted to do, which was to perform high-impact research in close collaboration with industrial partners in the automotive, satellite, and financial sectors. I was also able to draw on my previous experience, which helped a lot, and benefited from significant financial and administrative support. But eventually, once again, Luxembourg not being home and too small for my liking, I was tempted to move back to Canada, mostly for personal reasons.
After several attempts, I am now in Canada, most of the time and maybe for good! The University of Ottawa has offered me generous terms and a Canada Research Chair. I am quite happy with what I have been able to accomplish so far. Good industry partners, some talented students and postdocs, and exciting projects. The burgeoning development of AI has brought many opportunities for software engineering research, both by enabling the automation of complex development tasks and by providing new fascinating problems regarding the engineering of trustworthy AI-enabled systems.
The latest, perhaps surprising step in my career is my involvement as Director of the Lero centre, Ireland’s national centre for software research. Lero is in many ways in line with my previous professional challenges. Ireland is a small country but it has a very active high-tech scene. The software industry is therefore central to the country’s dynamic economy, such that Lero has a significant impact and many interesting opportunities for collaboration. Impact is what I have always sought through my research and time will tell if I can succeed in this new adventure.
Although perhaps confusing, there is actually a logical and consistent thread in my choices over the years. I have always sought to discover new research environments and learn from new perspectives on how to increase the impact of research. That is what still motivates me, after 30 years.
Lionel C. Briand is professor of software engineering and has shared appointments between (1) The University of Ottawa, Canada, where he holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) and (2) Ireland's Lero Centre for Software Research, where he holds the position of Director. In collaboration with colleagues, over 30 years, he has run many collaborative research projects with companies in the automotive, satellite, aerospace, energy, financial, and legal domains. Lionel has held various engineering, academic, and leading positions in seven countries. He was one of the founders of the ICST conference (IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, a CORE A event) and its first general chair. He was also EiC of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) for 13 years and led, in collaboration with first Victor Basili and then Tom Zimmermann, the journal to the top tier of the very best publication venues in software engineering.
Lionel was elevated to the grades of IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow for his work on software testing and verification. He was granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award, the ACM SIGSOFT outstanding research award, and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award, respectively in 2012, 2022, and 2013. He received an ERC Advanced grant in 2016 — on the topic of modelling and testing cyber-physical systems — which is the most prestigious individual research award in the European Union. In 2023, he was elevated to the rank of fellow of the Academy of Science, Royal Society of Canada. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) on "Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance". His research interests include: Trustworthy AI, software testing and verification, applications of AI in software engineering, model-driven software development, requirements engineering, and empirical software engineering.