This spring, I attended the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Ottawa, Canada. It was my first conference, and a fantastic experience. As a Master’s student and co-author of a paper on ML-enabled systems, I was excited to gain new insights and discuss my work with the international software engineering community.
ICSE is the largest international conference for software engineering research. Every year, many different researchers come together to discuss a variety of topics, including testing, security, AI, and more recently SE4AI and AI4SE. For me, this meant selecting the most interesting talks from up to ten parallel sessions. The variety of topics was both overwhelming at times, but the talks were inspiring and I learned a lot.
During my Master’s degree and before attending ICSE, I was not entirely convinced that I wanted to pursue a PhD in software engineering. However, my experiences and engagement with the research community have motivated me to continue my work and contribute further to the research community.
Overall, I found it really rewarding to spend three days at the conference in Ottawa, meeting new people and exploring the city. I would like to thank the ACM-W scholarship program for giving me the opportunity to attend my first conference. I am looking forward to many more in the future!