From the VERSEN board

16-Dec-2020

In October, we had our first meeting with the advisory board. The members provided useful feedback on the software manifesto. They recognise the challenges that we listed, but also gave advise on how to translate the manifesto in the language of our stakeholders.

In the mean time, we have also talked with more people about the manifesto. We now have a draft document that relates the software technology challenges to AI. Further, the Secure Software Alliance is actively helping us to make companies and public administration aware of the challenges in developing reliable and secure software.

We also got in touch with software researchers from France and Finland, who also published similar national manifestos, and are facing the same challenges as the Dutch software research community. We have decided to join forces, and to come with a shared statement - where we hope to involve also software researchers from other European countries - that can be used to increase the support for software research also at the European level.

Finally, we have worked on several community activities. Members of the VERSEN executive board will meet in January with young software researchers, to discuss how we can best involve them in VERSEN. If you are interested in joining this discussion, please let me know. Jorge Perez has kindly agreed to start working on a communication plan for VERSEN, with the support of Tanja Vos, Marielle Stoelinga, Slinger Jansen and Ivano Malavolta. Moreover, Bastiaan Heeren will look into how we can organise the VERSEN community also around education.

And of course, last but not least, there are some VERSEN-related events coming up. The SEN symposium has been moved to February 18 and 19. More information about this event you can find in this newsletter. During ICT.Open, there will be a plenary announcement of the winners of the VERSEN PhD awards.

This was my last message to you as the VERSEN chair, as I will step down as a chair during the SEN symposium. I want to thank you all for the nice collaborations over the last years, and I'm happy to say that I will keep on contributing to VERSEN.

On behalf of the VERSEN board members,
Marieke Huisman (chair)