Automated Software Specialisation Using Genetic Improvement

通过将具有挑战性和耗时的软件专门化任务从人类转移到机器，该协会将改变软件开发的面貌。它将以自动化的方式为特定应用领域开发专业化和提高通用软件效率的新方法。所开发的技术将与程序无关，因此适用于任何类型的软件。因此，它们将允许加速计算密集型的计算，例如，在生物信息学或医疗保健领域。因此，该奖学金可以通过提供一种自动化的方式来适应和加速在研究和工业中大量领域使用的现有软件，从而有助于推动其他研究领域的研究发展。该项目将利用和开发软件工程领域的新方法，称为遗传改进，以实现项目的目标。遗传改良是一个新的研究领域，在过去的几年里才作为一个独立的领域出现。有几个因素促成了该领域的发展和成功，其中之一是在线可用代码的绝对数量，以及对软件非功能属性（如能量或内存消耗）的自动化改进的关注。Petke博士是世界领先的基因改良专家，在自动化软件专业化和移植方面发表了获奖作品。她获得了两次“Humies”奖，以表彰她通过遗传和进化计算得出的与人类竞争的结果，并在国际软件测试与分析研讨会上获得了最佳论文奖。这项工作也被媒体广泛报道，包括《连线》杂志和BBC点击。因此，基因改进在软件开发过程某些方面的自动化潜力已经在学术界内外得到了认可。Petke将与一家名为Satalia的英国公司合作，该公司为该行业提供最新的优化技术。她将应用这个项目的交付成果来自动适应和加速他们的通才优化算法，以解决现实世界中特定类别的问题。一个例子是对通用路由程序进行专门化，以设计用于宽带连接的最佳网络。因此，该项目的可交付成果将通过提供技术，为现实世界的优化问题提供自动化的软件专业化过程，从而为英国经济做出贡献。

This fellowship will change the face of software development by transferring the challenging and time-consuming task of software specialisation from human to machine. It will develop novel approaches for specialising and improving efficiency of generalist software for particular application domains in an automated way. The developed techniques will be program-agnostic and thus applicable to any type of software. Therefore, they will allow to speed-up computationally intensive calculations that arise, for instance, in the field of bioinformatics or healthcare. This fellowship thus can contribute to driving research development in other fields of research by providing an automated way of adapting and speeding-up existing software used in a plethora of areas, both in research and in the industry. The project will utilise and develop novel methods in the field of software engineering, called genetic improvement, to achieve the goals of the project. Genetic improvement is a novel field of research that only arose as a standalone area in the last few years. Several factors contributed to the development and success of this field, one of which is the sheer amount of code available online and focus on automated improvement of non-functional properties of software, such as energy or memory consumption. Dr. Petke is a world-leading expert on genetic improvement, publishing award-winning work on automated software specialisation and transplantation. She won two `Humies' awarded for human-competitive results produced by genetic and evolutionary computation and a best paper award at the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. This work was also widely covered in media, including the Wired magazine and BBC Click. The potential of genetic improvement for automating certain aspects of the software development process has thus been already recognised in the academic community and beyond.Dr. Petke will collaborate with a UK-based company, called Satalia, which provides the latest optimisation techniques to the industry. She will apply deliverables of this project to automatically adapt and speed-up their generalist optimisation algorithms to particular classes of real-world problems. An example is specialisation of a general routing program to devising an optimal network for broadband connections. Therefore, the deliverables of this project will contribute to the UK economy by providing techniques that will automate the process of software specialisation for real-world optimisation problems.