The quantum threat to cybersecurity has accelerated the standardization of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). Migrating legacy software to these quantum-safe algorithms is not a simple library swap, but a new software engineering challenge: existing vulnerability detection, refactoring, and testing tools are not designed for PQC's probabilistic behavior, side-channel sensitivity, and complex performance trade-offs. To address these challenges, this paper outlines a vision for a new class of tools and introduces the Automated Quantum-safe Adaptation (AQuA) framework, with a three-pillar agenda for PQC-aware detection, semantic refactoring, and hybrid verification, thereby motivating Quantum-Safe Software Engineering (QSSE) as a distinct research direction.
Large Language Models, particularly decoder-only generative models such as GPT, are increasingly used to automate Software Engineering tasks. These models are primarily guided through natural language prompts, making prompt engineering a critical factor in system performance and behavior. Despite their growing role in SE research, prompt-related decisions are rarely documented in a systematic or transparent manner, hindering reproducibility and comparability across studies. To address this gap, we conducted a two-phase empirical study. First, we analyzed nearly 300 papers published at the top-3 SE conferences since 2022 to assess how prompt design, testing, and optimization are currently reported. Second, we surveyed 105 program committee members from these conferences to capture their expectations for prompt reporting in LLM-driven research. Based on the findings, we derived a structured guideline that distinguishes essential, desirable, and exceptional reporting elements. Our results reveal significant misalignment between current practices and reviewer expectations, particularly regarding version disclosure, prompt justification, and threats to validity. We present our guideline as a step toward improving transparency, reproducibility, and methodological rigor in LLM-based SE research.
Nasrin Taghavi, Robert K. Niven, Matthias Kramer
et al.
Groundwater vulnerability assessment (GVA) is critical for understanding contaminant migration into groundwater systems, yet conventional methods often overlook its probabilistic nature. Bayesian inference offers a robust framework using Bayes’ rule to enhance decision-making through posterior probability calculations. This study introduces inverse Bayesian methods for GVA using spatial-series data, focusing on nitrate concentrations in groundwater as an indicator of groundwater vulnerability in agricultural catchments. Using the joint maximum <i>a-posteriori</i> (JMAP) and variational Bayesian approximation (VBA) algorithms, the advantages of the Bayesian framework over traditional index-based methods are demonstrated for GVA of the Burdekin Basin, Queensland, Australia. This provides an evidence-based methodology for GVA which enables model ranking, parameter estimation, and uncertainty quantification.
Mechanical drawing. Engineering graphics, Physical and theoretical chemistry
Sanja Mahović Poljaček, Eva Đakulović, Tamara Tomašegović
et al.
In this research, natural pigments, anthocyanins, were used to produce bio-based films that can be used in smart packaging, as they serve as pH indicators to monitor the freshness of the packaged products. The aim of the research is to analyse the colorimetric and optical differences in the produced films before and after they are exposed to the environment with different pH values. In order to evaluate the possibility of using the produced films in printing processes, the adhesion of the produced pH indicators to packaging material was determined. This research has shown that it is possible to produce pH indicators from anthocyanins extracted from plant residues as well as from different types of starch. The influence of the anthocyanins immobilised in the starches on the colorimetric properties of the produced films and the adhesion of the films to the packaging material was evaluated. The research results showed that it is possible to produce a pH-responsive indicator based on the ingredients used. Different types of starch showed no significant difference in the visual appearance of the films, but a difference was found when different anthocyanins were used. It was proposed to use potato starch with anthocyanins from red cabbage and maize starch with anthocyanins from red onions to produce pH indicators. These polymer composites showed clear color shifts that are easy to recognise visually.
The regeneration of a historical village, in view of its development and attractiveness, presupposes the analysis of the anthropic territory in its historical and cultural characteristics and in its urban dynamics of inhabited urban space, in order to identify, through a multidisciplinary reading, a qualifying system of matrices for the promotion and valorisation of territorial peculiarities. But what opens up further potential for valorisation is to look at the relationship between identity - as the bearer of a defined cultural system and tradition rooted in a place - and the way in which this identity enters into relation with the surrounding territory, creating a perceptive environment that is both natural and anthropic.
This design practice aims to promote the activation of the island in the form of micro-intervention by the design and construction of a small wedding hall which brought the island back to attention. From the perspective of traditional culture and human geography, the architects took full advantage of the natural resources when designing the site. In the process of form generation, the architects extracted the prototype of seaweed cottages and translated them into more abstract geometric forms. Meanwhile, by using fair-faced concrete, the space construction mixed the characteristics of traditional houses and modern architecture. Using the opening and skylight as an induced event, the space of the wedding hall gained a narrative clue of the wedding ceremony. After the construction of the wedding hall, the goal of activation was achieved with various benefits brought to the island.
سلولهای خورشیدی حساسشده به مواد رنگزا (DSSC) بهدلیل پدیده نوترکیبی الکترونها در محل اتصال اکسید رسانا و الکترولیت، با محدودیتهایی در دستیابی به بازده بالا مواجه هستند. در این پژوهش، برای افزایش بازده DSSC از دوپکردن نانوذرات TiO2 با نانوساختارهای WO3 و نقره استفاده شده است. نتایج نشان داد که استفاده از این ترکیب در ساخت فوتوآند موجب کاهش پدیده نوترکیبی الکترونها و بهبود بازده تبدیل توان سلول خورشیدی میشود. تحلیل ریختشناسی نانوذرات سنتزشده با استفاده از میکروسکوپ الکترونی روبشی (SEM) و طیفسنجی فروسرخ تبدیل فوریه (FTIR) انجام گرفت. یافتههای این مطالعه نشان دادند که فوتوآند مبتنی بر نانوساختار سهگانه Ag-TiO2-WO3 عملکرد بهتری در مقایسه با فوتوآندهای ساختهشده از TiO2، WO₃ و TiO2-WO₃ خالص دارد. بهطور مشخص، سلول دارای فوتوآند Ag-TiO2-WO3 به چگالی جریان اتصال کوتاه (Jsc) معادل mA/cm2 13.63 و بازده تبدیل توان برابر 6.87 درصد دست یافت. در مقابل، سلولهای ساختهشده با فوتوآندهای TiO2، WO3، و TiO2-WO3 خالص به ترتیب بازدههایی برابر با 3.171، 0.93 و 5.631 درصد را نشان دادند.
Marc Bruni, Fabio Gabrielli, Mohammad Ghafari
et al.
Prompt engineering reduces reasoning mistakes in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness in mitigating vulnerabilities in LLM-generated code remains underexplored. To address this gap, we implemented a benchmark to automatically assess the impact of various prompt engineering strategies on code security. Our benchmark leverages two peer-reviewed prompt datasets and employs static scanners to evaluate code security at scale. We tested multiple prompt engineering techniques on GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4o, and GPT-4o-mini. Our results show that for GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini, a security-focused prompt prefix can reduce the occurrence of security vulnerabilities by up to 56%. Additionally, all tested models demonstrated the ability to detect and repair between 41.9% and 68.7% of vulnerabilities in previously generated code when using iterative prompting techniques. Finally, we introduce a "prompt agent" that demonstrates how the most effective techniques can be applied in real-world development workflows.
Shavindra Wickramathilaka, John Grundy, Kashumi Madampe
et al.
The use of diverse mobile applications among senior users is becoming increasingly widespread. However, many of these apps contain accessibility problems that result in negative user experiences for seniors. A key reason is that software practitioners often lack the time or resources to address the broad spectrum of age-related accessibility and personalisation needs. As current developer tools and practices encourage one-size-fits-all interfaces with limited potential to address the diversity of senior needs, there is a growing demand for approaches that support the systematic creation of adaptive, accessible app experiences. To this end, we present AdaptForge, a novel model-driven engineering (MDE) approach that enables advanced design-time adaptations of mobile application interfaces and behaviours tailored to the accessibility needs of senior users. AdaptForge uses two domain-specific languages (DSLs) to address age-related accessibility needs. The first model defines users' context-of-use parameters, while the second defines conditional accessibility scenarios and corresponding UI adaptation rules. These rules are interpreted by an MDE workflow to transform an app's original source code into personalised instances. We also report evaluations with professional software developers and senior end-users, demonstrating the feasibility and practical utility of AdaptForge.
Qiaolin Qin, Ronnie de Souza Santos, Rodrigo Spinola
Context. The rise of generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot has transformed how software is learned and written. In software engineering (SE) education, these tools offer new opportunities for support, but also raise concerns about over-reliance, ethical use, and impacts on learning. Objective. This study investigates how undergraduate SE students use GenAI tools, focusing on the benefits, challenges, ethical concerns, and instructional expectations that shape their experiences. Method. We conducted a survey with 130 undergraduate students from two universities. The survey combined structured Likert-scale items and open-ended questions to investigate five dimensions: usage context, perceived benefits, challenges, ethical and instructional perceptions. Results. Students most often use GenAI for incremental learning and advanced implementation, reporting benefits such as brainstorming support and confidence-building. At the same time, they face challenges including unclear rationales and difficulty adapting outputs. Students highlight ethical concerns around fairness and misconduct, and call for clearer instructional guidance. Conclusion. GenAI is reshaping SE education in nuanced ways. Our findings underscore the need for scaffolding, ethical policies, and adaptive instructional strategies to ensure that GenAI supports equitable and effective learning.
Mauro Marcelino, Marcos Alves, Bianca Trinkenreich
et al.
[Context] An evidence briefing is a concise and objective transfer medium that can present the main findings of a study to software engineers in the industry. Although practitioners and researchers have deemed Evidence Briefings useful, their production requires manual labor, which may be a significant challenge to their broad adoption. [Goal] The goal of this registered report is to describe an experimental protocol for evaluating LLM-generated evidence briefings for secondary studies in terms of content fidelity, ease of understanding, and usefulness, as perceived by researchers and practitioners, compared to human-made briefings. [Method] We developed an RAG-based LLM tool to generate evidence briefings. We used the tool to automatically generate two evidence briefings that had been manually generated in previous research efforts. We designed a controlled experiment to evaluate how the LLM-generated briefings compare to the human-made ones regarding perceived content fidelity, ease of understanding, and usefulness. [Results] To be reported after the experimental trials. [Conclusion] Depending on the experiment results.
In this comprehensive interview, Professor Kate Crawford discusses the complex and pervasive impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems on our global ecosystem, critically examining the material realities and extensive influence of these infrastructures. Delving into the socio-political and historical aspects of design in the context of AI, she shows that design is intrinsically linked to the consequences of capitalism, colonialism, and the concentration of power in technological systems. She challenges designers to acknowledge these connections and stimulate critical discussions about the role of design, promoting a vision where they can encourage diversity, challenge AI-driven homogenization, and question the processes of constructing meaning and decision-making in technology. Prof. Crawford posits that our relationship with technology is integral to our futures and underscores the importance of individual and collective politics in shaping these outcomes. The discussion advocates for a shift from technology-centrism to prioritizing collective planetary needs. It urges us to consider what kind of world we want to live in and what role technology should play in it.
This paper critically examines the concept and role of the design brief in design epistemology, highlighting its inherent limitations, while addressing the agency and challenges of ‘unknowing’ in Design. Traditionally seen as a contextualized issue to address, the design brief is often shaped by established norms and values, framing problems in ways that align with dominant societal groups. This framing encourages a positivistic approach and assumes that design should move towards a single ‘right’ solution for a better world. However, this perspective disregards the complexity and diversity of our contemporary world and overlooks how the brief is itself a normalizing process in design. We argue for an alternative understanding of the design brief as a political agent for embracing unknowing in design as a means to challenge the boundaries of accepted knowledge and to engage with the world’s complexity.
This essay introduces CYANOTYPES, a collaborative multi-year research project that set out to explore and address how people across the creative sector — arts, culture, and design in all their manifestations — might organise learning in the (immediate) future, and outlines a creative agency model to facilitate the development of curricula and custom learning journeys, contending that especially in the context of the growing role of intelligent systems in the creative process, a focus on creative agency makes sense to frame the analysis as well as the design of learning processes.
Diana Robinson, Christian Cabrera, Andrew D. Gordon
et al.
What if end users could own the software development lifecycle from conception to deployment using only requirements expressed in language, images, video or audio? We explore this idea, building on the capabilities that generative Artificial Intelligence brings to software generation and maintenance techniques. How could designing software in this way better serve end users? What are the implications of this process for the future of end-user software engineering and the software development lifecycle? We discuss the research needed to bridge the gap between where we are today and these imagined systems of the future.
Marco Autili, Martina De Sanctis, Paola Inverardi
et al.
As testified by new regulations like the European AI Act, worries about the human and societal impact of (autonomous) software technologies are becoming of public concern. Human, societal, and environmental values, alongside traditional software quality, are increasingly recognized as essential for sustainability and long-term well-being. Traditionally, systems are engineered taking into account business goals and technology drivers. Considering the growing awareness in the community, in this paper, we argue that engineering of systems should also consider human, societal, and environmental drivers. Then, we identify the macro and technological challenges by focusing on humans and their role while co-existing with digital systems. The first challenge considers humans in a proactive role when interacting with digital systems, i.e., taking initiative in making things happen instead of reacting to events. The second concerns humans having a reactive role in interacting with digital systems, i.e., humans interacting with digital systems as a reaction to events. The third challenge focuses on humans with a passive role, i.e., they experience, enjoy or even suffer the decisions and/or actions of digital systems. The fourth challenge concerns the duality of trust and trustworthiness, with humans playing any role. Building on the new human, societal, and environmental drivers and the macro and technological challenges, we identify a research roadmap of digital systems for humanity. The research roadmap is concretized in a number of research directions organized into four groups: development process, requirements engineering, software architecture and design, and verification and validation.
It is well known that the universe is undergoing accelerated expansion during recent times and that it underwent a decelerated expansion in early times. The deceleration parameter, essentially the second derivative of the scale factor, can be used to describe these eras, with a negative parameter for acceleration and a positive parameter for deceleration. Apart from the standard <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mo>Λ</mo></semantics></math></inline-formula>CDM model in general relativity, there are many cosmological models in various other theories of gravity. In order to describe these models, especially the deviation from general relativity, the jerk parameter was introduced, which is basically the third derivative of the scale factor. In the <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mo>Λ</mo></semantics></math></inline-formula>CDM model in general relativity, the jerk parameter <i>j</i> is constant, and <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>j</mi><mo>=</mo><mn>1</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>. The constant jerk parameter, <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>j</mi><mo>=</mo><mn>1</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, leads to two different scale factor solutions, one power law and the other exponential. The power-law solution corresponds to a model in which our universe expands with deceleration, while the exponential solution corresponds to a model in which it expands by accelerating. In this study, the cosmological consequences of such a selection of the jerk parameter on the non-minimally coupled <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>f</mi><mo>(</mo><mi>R</mi><mo>,</mo><mi>T</mi><mo>)</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> theory of gravity (where <i>R</i> is the Ricci scalar, and <i>T</i> is the trace of the energy–momentum tensor) and the dynamic properties of these models are investigated on a flat Friedmann–Lemaitre–Robertson–Walker backgfround.
Mechanical drawing. Engineering graphics, Physical and theoretical chemistry
Julia Romanenkova, Ivan Bratus, Nina Araya Berrios
The article is dedicated to the examination of the bookplate of modern Ukraine, which starting from the 1990s entered the state of its revival and flourishing. A version of the bookplate typology, formed on the basis of pictorial motifs as the main classification criteria is proposed, while typologically bookplate is usually divided into groups based on the scope of use or the technique for creating graphic sheets. The reasons for the actualization of bookplate as a type of engraving at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the factors that influenced its popularization outside the country, and the transformation of the functions of bookplate are considered. The role of collecting as one of the most powerful stimuli for the popularization of bookplate in the modern world of graphic arts is emphasized; the leading centers for the development of the bookplate in Ukraine at the beginning of the 21st century and the technique preferred by artists are indicated.