2021/2608Postdoc in Behavioural Software Engineering (# of pos: 2)

At Mälardalen University people meet who want to develop themselves and the future. We have 19 900 students reading courses and study programmes in Business and Economics, Health, Engineering and Education at our campuses in Eskilstuna and Västerås, or by distance. We conduct research within all fields of education and have internationally prominent research in Future Energy and Embedded Systems. Our close collaboration with the private and public sectors enable us at MDH to contribute towards the better health of people and towards a more sustainable planet. At the School of Innovation, Design and Engineering our students are studying to be for example innovators, entrepreneurs, illustrators, communications officers, network technicians and engineers. Here we have the research specialisations of Embedded Systems, and Innovation and Product Realisation. Our work takes place in cooperation with and in strategic agreements with companies, organisations and public authorities in the region.

We are offering one or two postdoc positions in behavioural software engineering, focusing on gamification and/or behaviour-driven and emotional high-level language engineering. Details on the directions of investigation are provided below.

Software Engineering for Gamification: Gamification refers to the use of game elements in “serious” contexts, and in general it is applied whenever users’ engagement needs to be promoted and maintained over time. Indeed, gamification gained popularity in disparate scenarios, notably smart cities (mobility, environmental impact), health care, education. A critical concern of gamified applications is their adaptation to the, possibly evolving, users’ profiles and preferences, as well as the intended goals of the gamification itself. In this respect, gamification development is still a largely hand-craft effort, making it difficult to re-use, maintain, and adapt the developed solutions.

The postdoc will work on developing more rigorous software engineering approaches to the design and realisation of gamification applications. By adopting separation of concerns and domain-specific languages, different stakeholders can focus on their domain of expertise and work on a reduced/simplified sub-portion of the application. In turn, this enhances the chances of re-using parts of the solution as well as to maintain and adapt it to specific users and different contexts. The developed solutions will be empirically evaluated in industrially relevant case scenarios, notably the adoption and management of agile development teams, the education and training of employees to new technologies, business processes, and so forth. In this respect, we have several ongoing projects involving the training/learning of new design approaches, notably SACSys, AIDOaRt, and BUMBLE.

Behaviour-Driven and Emotional Engineering of Adaptive High-Level Languages: Software-intensive systems (SIS) are getting extremely complex, heterogeneous, and distributed. Every SIS is expected to be connected to multiple networks and to be able to effectively interact with theoretically any other SIS connected to the same networks. To develop software able to run on these systems, that span across several domains and whose engineering involve multiple stakeholders at many levels, strict and inflexible modelling and programming languages are not suited. To make different domain-specific languages to cooperate is often a challenge. To maximise the throughput of and communication betwen different stakeholders (even in the same domain) language concepts need to be engineered, rendered, edited and stored in user-specific ways.

The postdoc will work on an innovative way of engineering modelling and programming languages. By leveraging behaviour-driven and emotional engineering, the creation of a language will not anymore the work of a handful creative language engineering. It will instead be an iterative and end-user-driven process, where the language engineer provides a skeleton language. Starting from that, the interactions (behaviours) and reactions (emotions) of a set of expert end-users (a balanced set from academia and industry) exposed to the language set the path for the language's evolution, under the supervision of the language engineer. The same approach will be embedded in the language itself to be able to adapt, mostly in terms of concrete syntax and to a certain extent, to specific user needs. The developed solutions will be empirically evaluated in industrial use cases from active industry-driven projects such as BUMBLE, HERO and MoDev.

The position is a temporary employment of 2 years.