3rd Special Section on "Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering" at IJCNN 2021

In the last decades, software systems become pervasive in almost all areas of society also growing in size, complexity, and functionality. This continuous growth demands the study, development and implementation of new Software Engineering (SE) methodologies and tools (e.g., software analysis and design, software portability, formal verification and validation, software measurement, and software maintenance) to build more reliable software. However, despite the introduction of innovative approaches and paradigms useful in the SE field, their technological transfer on a larger scale has been very gradual and still almost limited. This is due to the critical aspects in SE with respect to other well-founded engineering disciplines since SE is strongly influenced by social aspects (i.e., human knowledge, skills, expertise and interactions) that are highly context-driven, non-mechanical and strongly based on context and semantic knowledge. Human factor characterizes many of the problems associated with SE, including those observed in development effort estimation, software quality and reliability prediction, software design, and software testing. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to define effective approaches for improving software quality allowing a growth in the project success rates. AI can provide the capabilities to assist software teams in many aspects, from automating routine tasks to providing project analytics and actionable recommendations, and even making decisions where non-trivial context detection and information processing is needed. Recent works reported that several software engineering problems could effectively tackled using a combination of AI techniques such as NLP, machine learning, fuzzy logic, multi-objective search, metaheuristics and clustering algorithms. Starting from the above considerations, the objective of this special session is to foster the integration between SE and AI communities to improve research results, teaching and mentoring, and ultimately industrial practice. The special session will be inserted in the IJCNN conference and part of the proceedings of the whole held as a Virtual Conference, 18-22 July 2021.