Preamble:
What I am about to share mostly concerns general software engineering conferences, such as ICSE, FSE, and ASE. Though I was told by colleagues that some of my points are valid in other communities, I am not trying to generalize beyond this scope, as I base my arguments on personal experience.
Note that, among others, I have co-authored 26 papers in the technical track of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) over the years, including two Most Influential Paper (MIP) awards, though ICSE has never been my focus. I have also submitted many papers that were rejected. My first ICSE paper was presented in 1993 in Baltimore, and I was the ICSE PC co-chair in 2014 in India! I therefore have a substantial experience with SE conferences, in addition to what was shared with me by many colleagues, on which to reflect.
I have frequently expressed my views on this topic, but I never articulated them in one place, to a sufficient level of detail. I will, however, make the best attempt to remain concise as I presume nobody wants to read an extensive essay on such a topic.
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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.