Event Details

Dr Barry Porter, of Lancaster's School of Computing and Communications, will be delivering a talk about self-designing software systems. This is the penultimate lecture in this year's Science and Technology 'Impact' Lecture Series.

This week’s Science and Technology lecture will be delivered by Dr Barry Porter who will explore self-designing software systems.

Modern software systems have become extremely complex, reaching tens of millions of lines of code, and are deployed into unknown environments with frequently changing conditions. Computer scientists have long sought to tackle this complexity, and in this lecture we reveal some of the latest research on software that takes responsibility for its own design. Using real-time machine learning, and a new kind of programming technology, we show how software can assemble itself from small building blocks – and can then observe and learn about its own behaviour in order to redesign itself to better suit the world around it. This technique can help reduce complexity in building software and also begins to redefine the relationship between humans and machines in achieving an objective - with humans offering guidance and creativity while the machine fills in the fine details.