[general_dat] Charla de Roberto Di Cosmo - Software Heritage: Towards A New Era for Software Engineering, Cybersecurity, and AI

[Fernando Schapachnik]

Invitamos a toda la comunidad a la charla del profesor Roberto Di Cosmo 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Di_Cosmo>.

Fecha: martes 1 de abril, 14 hs
Aula a definir.

Title: Software Heritage: Towards A New Era for Software Engineering, 
Cybersecurity, and AI

Abstract:

Open Source is at the heart of our digital society and embodies a 
growing part of our technical and organisational knowledge. It speeds up 
innovation, but also raises key challenges about the quality, evolution 
and security of the many components that are put together in modern 
software systems: how to be sure that the source code of a key module we 
use will be still there when we need it in the future?  do we really 
know what source code we are using, and where it comes from? how can we 
adress cybersecurity if we do not know? Can software engineering studies 
take advantage from, and improve the quality of the massive amount of 
information that is available about hundreds of millions of software 
projects worldwide?

With the AI tidal wave, (open source) software has become not only 
essential to build new LLMs, but also a precious training dataset that 
plays a key role in the quality of these models. What are the challenges 
and opportunities that arise?

In this talk we will present an update on Software Heritage, a 
groundbreaking non profit initiative launched by Inria in 2016 in 
partnership with UNESCO to collect, preserve and share all publicly 
available software in source code form. Software Heritage has already 
built the larges public archive, with more than 22 billion files from 
more than 340 million software origins, collected from more than 5000 
different code hosting and distribution platforms.

After ten years of work, we show concrete examples of how this is much 
more than an archive: it is the Very Large Telescope that we need to 
explore the galaxy of software development at a global scale. With the 
recent launch of the CodeCommons project, we can work together to tackle 
all of the above challenges much better than before.

-- 
Fernando P. Schapachnik
fernando at schapachnik.com.ar