Keynote - Vinay Kulkarni

Vinay Kulkarni

"Relevance of MDE in increasingly dynamic world"
We live in a world replete with complex system of systems that need to deliver on stated goals in an increasingly dynamic and uncertain environment. Coming up with an adaptive response and effecting it in an increasingly shortening window of opportunity is a critical need. Current practice has turned out ineffective. An approach building further upon proven results from diverse areas such as Modelling & simulation, Artificial Intelligence, Control Theory, and Software Engineering seems promising and pragmatic. MDE can play a key role in providing an effective realisation of this approach. However, as the need being felt across a wide variety of systems namely information, cyber-physical, and socio technical, MDE needs to broaden its current sharp focus on modelling of software systems. Also, MDE can augment Generative AI in a symbiotic manner where strengths on one help overcome weaknesses of the other. This talk aims to provide an overview of this thesis, technology infrastructure needed to support this thesis, and illustrations from a wide variety of domains demonstrating progress made so far.

Vinay Kulkarni is TCS Fellow at Tata Consultancy Services where he heads Software Systems & Services research. His research interests include digital twins, AI-driven adaptive enterprises, learning-native software systems, AI in software development, model-driven software engineering, and enterprise modelling. Current research focus is complex system of systems that operate in a dynamic and uncertain world. Conceptually our approach builds further upon innovative integration of proven results from Modelling & simulation, AI and Control theory. Our implementation is characterised by symbiotic integration of Generative AI and Model Driven Engineering, Operationalisation of knowledge, and Model based analysis. Our approach and associated technology have delivered value not only on a variety of business problems but also on societal problems. For instance, this research was used to construct a "City Digital Twin" to predict and control Covid-19 pandemic in an Indian city.

Prior work focused on making software development an engineering endeavour with a-priori guarantees about properties such as correctness, scalability, productivity, maintainability etc. Involved in development of automation tools and method using model-based techniques that are used by industry for past several years. Much of this work has found way into international standards, three of which Vinay contributed to in a leadership role. This work also received fair mention in respected international print media.

Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, Vinay is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology Madras and serves as Visiting Professor at Aston University Birmingham, Middlesex University London, and Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.

Workshop Papers

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