Carlos Gavidia-Calderon

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Software Engineer at The Alan Turing Institute

Autonomous systems, such as drones and rescue robots, are increasingly used during emergencies. They deliver services and provide situational awareness that facilitate emergency management and response. To do so, they need to interact and cooperate with humans in their environment. Human behaviour is uncertain and complex, so it can be difficult to...

The UK government and the public wish to see the National Health Service (NHS) use data and Artificial Intelligence for public good. However, there is a major challenge in making health data available for research whilst respecting patient privacy. Synthetic data generation is an emerging technique that enables access to data that, in some way, sha...

Autonomous systems, such as drones, are critical for emergency mitigation, management, and recovery. They provide situational awareness and deliver communication services which effectively guide emergency responders’ decision making. This combination of technology and people comprises a socio-technical system. Yet, focusing on the use of drone tech...

Many software engineering tasks can be formulated as search problems. Building tests requires selecting among infinite test inputs to maximise code coverage. In systems with large test-suites and limited resources, developers choose test execution order among all possible test-case permutations to maximise fault detection. Search-Based Software Eng...

While auction theory views bids and valuations as continuous variables, real-world auctions are necessarily discrete. In this paper, we use a combination of analytical and computational methods to investigate whether incorporating discreteness substantially changes the predictions of auction theory, focusing on the case of uniformly distributed val...

There is a plethora of software development practices. Practice adoption by a development team is a challenge by itself. This makes software process improvement very hard for organisations. I believe a key factor in successful practice adoption is proper incentives. Wrong incentives can lead a process improvement effort to failure. I propose to add...

Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithms emulate the foraging behaviour of ants to solve optimisation problems. They have proven effective in both academic and industrial settings. ACO algorithms share many features among them. Isula encapsulates these commonalities and exposes them for reuse in the form of a Java library. In this paper, we use the...

Priority inflation occurs when a Quality-Assurance (QA) engineer or a project manager requesting a feature inflates the priority of their task so that developers deliver the fix or the new functionality more quickly. We survey developers and show that priority inflation occurs and misallocates developer time. We are the first to apply empirical gam...

Developers continuously invent new practices, usually grounded in hard-won experience, not theory. Game theory studies cooperation and conflict; its use will speed the development of effective processes. A survey of game theory in software engineering finds highly idealised models that are rarely based on process data. This is because software proc...