Nestled in South Lake Union, Northeastern University’s Seattle Campus has been steadily growing over the past five years since it opened in 2012. Their flagship program, the Masters in Computer Science, will produce around 80 graduates in the next year, with most graduates remaining in the Seattle area to work at Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Zillow, Slalom Consulting, and a host of other companies.
In May, Northeastern will continue to grow its impact on the region by hosting the IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) at its South Lake Union campus. ICSA is held once every three years in North America, and will bring to Seattle 200 top computer scientists and software engineers from all over the world. ICSA focuses on cutting-edge research on the latest theories, tools and engineering practices for designing and building software systems. It is an excellent opportunity for the local tech industry to engage with leading computer scientists from universities and industry R&D labs around the world.
ICSA brings together a unique community of people working on novel approaches to software systems design and engineering. The program will include tutorials that present advanced tools and techniques for designing systems, small workshops focusing on specific high impact areas such as the Internet of Things, and a general research and engineering program with keynote speakers from local tech companies.
Dr. Clemens Syzperski from Microsoft, one of the conference Program chairs, has been involved with the ICSA community since its inception 25 years ago. “ICSA is different from typical academic conferences, and deliberately so,” says Syzperski. “The conference is organized around working sessions, with short presentations and extensive discussions. We want to build long-term collaborations between computer science researchers and practitioners who have common problems to solve and want to work towards high impact solutions.”
One topic of perpetual discussion and significant research findings at ICSA is the tension between building robust long-lasting systems and the inevitable shorter-term goals of agile methods. “Agility with software architecture is a really difficult thing to achieve,” says Dr. Philippe Krutchen, one of the founders of Rational Unified Process at IBM and the Chair of the ICSA Steering Committee. “This is a problem that is felt in all sectors of the software industry, and one that can only be addressed with inputs from both engineers and scientists. Small improvements driven by leading-edge research can have major economic and quality impacts on systems at scale.”
ICSA will be held at Northeastern’s Seattle Campus in South Lake Union from April 30 – May 4. Tutorials and workshops will be held on the Monday and Tuesday, with the main conference and keynotes from Wednesday to Friday. The full program and conference information will be posted on the ICSA Conference website. The first keynote speaker, Dr. Roger Barga, General Manager at Amazon Kinesis services at AWS, has just been confirmed.
There are still opportunities to get involved with ICSA through sponsorships, which give local companies full registrations for the entire conference program. Interested sponsors can learn more here.
