Special Seminar: Emilia Mendes

Department of Computer Science

Emilia Mendes will give a presentation with the title "Improving and Estimating the Value of Decisions" in lecture room 1171-72, TUAS building.

Abstract:

At the heart of an organisation’s ability to sustain its competitive advantage and to innovate are the knowledge it holds and its capability to learn and utilise such knowledge. Decision-making and knowledge management are intrinsically related given that the quality of the decisions taken are influenced by the usefulness and effective representation of the knowledge used when making those decisions.

This talk will introduce, with some empirical results, a framework called VALUE (improVing decision-mAking reLating to software-intensive prodUcts and sErvices development) aimed at improving value-based decision-making within the context of software/software-intensive product management. This framework contains tool support that includes, amongst other data visualisation options, a value estimation part using Bayesian Network, which is to be used to predict the overall value of decisions. The VALUE Framework was proposed within the context of a three-year research project – FiDiPro VALUE project (2015-2017), funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, and has the participation of some ICT companies.

Bio:

Emilia Mendes is Full Professor in Computer Science at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden), and also Distinguished Finnish Professor at the University of Oulu (Finland). She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (UK) in 1999, and then initiated her full time academic career at the Computer Science Department at the University of Auckland (NZ), where she worked for 12 years. After leaving NZ, and prior to moving to Sweden, she was Associate Professor at Zayed University (UAE) for a year. Her main research contributions were made to date in the application of machine learning techniques to Web and software effort estimation, and more recently to value estimation; however, she also carries out research in collaboration with colleagues and via the supervision of PhD students, in a wider spectrum of research topics (e.g. value-based decision making, software process improvement, personality in software development teams, computer science education, machine learning applied to healthcare). Overall, she has authored/co-authored over 200 research papers at international journal & conference, with seven best paper awards to date (2 at ESEM).  She is the co-editor of a book (2005 - Web Engineering) and sole author of two books (2007 - Cost Estimation Techniques for Web Projects; 2014 – Practitioner’s Knowledge Representation: a pathway to improve software effort estimation). She is in the editorial board of several journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and the Software Quality Journal. Finally, she worked in the ICT industry for ten years as programmer, business analyst and project manager prior to moving to the UK in the end of 1995 to initiate her PhD studies.