ICSE, Gothenburg

The lab presented its neuroscience research paper during the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering in Gothenburg, and served on the programme committee.

It was there we met NAVER Labs, with collaboration to follow, alongside existing work with IBM. The goal then was the same as now: bring deep learning and AI to the masses.

The photographs place the trip to the metre. The earliest frame is a ticket machine at Goteborg Landvetter on the morning of 27 May 2018, the day the conference opened. Everything after it sits on one GPS cluster in central Gothenburg, 57.697 north and 11.988 east, the Svenska Massan block on Massans Gata. Venue signage in the atrium gave the run of the week: 27 May to 3 June, the fortieth ICSE, hashtag ICSE2018.

The rooms were small. Twenty or thirty stacking chairs in rows, a roll-down screen, a flip chart parked against the curtain, water bottles on a trestle table at the front. On 28 May the sessions ran from late morning to just after five. A speaker took questions from a loose circle of chairs at 11:43. A presenter worked through a slide headed Background at 17:16, and another headed Methods three minutes later. Half the audience had laptops open.

One talk, on the afternoon of 29 May, came from IBM. Its closing slide set out three directions: systems for AI, to automate build, train, test and deployment flows; AI for systems, to derive insights on model, application and deployment evolution; and optimised AI operations across the pipeline. Lifecycle support had become table stakes for enterprise AI, the speaker argued, and the cheap work of metadata management and artifact traceability already paid. A separate session the afternoon before put IBM Watson Discovery Advisor on the projector and queried it live in front of the room.

A printed handout went round the tables on 28 May. It advertised the Genetic Programming Bibliography, hosted at Birmingham and maintained by W. B. Langdon at UCL, then standing at 12,121 references by 10,000 authors, with a line in bold asking every reader to make sure it had all of their papers.

The evening of 28 May moved off the conference floor. Delegate badges in the reception frames read Chalmers University of Technology and Politecnico di Milano. Later, a long table on a terrace a few streets from the venue, lanyards still on, eleven people at it, the last frame of the day at 20:27.