Presenter: Georgia Kapitsaki
Date: 01 March 2023

Existing work on the practical impact of software engineering (SE) research examines industrial relevance rather than adoption of study results, hence the question of how results have been practically applied remains open. To answer this and investigate the outcomes of impactful research, we performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 4,354 SE patents citing 1,690 SE papers published in four leading SE venues between 1975-2017. Moreover, we conducted a survey on 475 authors of 593 top-cited and awarded publications, achieving 26% response rate. Overall, researchers have equipped practitioners with various tools, processes, and methods, and improved many existing products. SE practice values knowledge-seeking research and is impacted by diverse cross-disciplinary SE areas. Practitioner-oriented publication venues appear more impactful than researcher-oriented ones, while industry-related tracks in conferences could enhance their impact. Some research works did not reach a wide footprint due to limited funding resources or unfavorable cost-benefit trade-off of the proposed solutions. The need for higher SE research funding could be corroborated through a dedicated empirical study. In general, the assessment of impact is subject to its definition. Therefore, academia and industry could jointly agree on a formal description to set a common ground for subsequent research on the topic.

Georgia (Zeta) M. Kapitsaki is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, UCY. She received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), her M.Sc. in Technoeconomical Systems and her Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She has worked as a software engineer in Germany, as a research associate at NTUA and as a laboratory assistant at the Technical Institute of Piraeus. She has been the principal investigator of national and EU funded research projects (e.g. SocioCoast, CYberSafetyIII) and has worked on EU projects (e.g. PaaSage, VALS). She has been involved in the organization of international conferences (e.g. ICSME 2022, SAC 2019). She has served as member of the program committee of international conferences (e.g. WISE 2022, ICWS 2022, ENASE 2022). She is a member of the editorial board of ERCIM News. She has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and scientific conferences and workshops. Her research interests include Software Engineering, Open source software and reuse, Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Context-aware Applications. She is a faculty member of the Software Engineering and Internet Technologies Laboratory (SEIT).