2nd International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering

Jordi Cabot will be keynote speaker on the BotSE 2020- 2nd International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering:

Lessons learned from building a commercial bot development platform

Two years ago we started the development of Xatkit, a (chat)bot development platform. That initial research prototype quickly evolved towards an open-source and low-code commercial chatbot platform that spans over 40 repositories and a couple of thousand commits. Along the journey, we have learned many lessons regarding the technical aspects of building (chat)bots (NLP, conversation design, intent libraries...) but also realized that many challenges are similar to those in other software projects as the "software" part of a chatbot (the definition of the bot DSL, events management, the flexible architecture to connect to external services, the DevOps cycle for bots ...) is as important as the "bot" part. 

In this talk, I'll share these hard-learned lessons, covering not only the technical challenges but also the business model, organizational and legal issues involved in the commercialization of Xatkit. I will illustrate these challenges with a number of bot examples, including one that will enable you to talk with your GitHub repositories! 

About the speaker: Jordi Cabot is an ICREA Research Professor at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, the Research center of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) where he is leading the SOM Research Lab. Previously, he has been at École des Mines de Nantes, Inria, University of Toronto, Politecnico di Milano and the Technical University of Catalonia. His research falls into the broad area of systems and software engineering, especially promoting the rigorous use of software models in all software tasks while keeping an eye on the most unpredictable element in any project: the people involved in it. 

Current research topics include pragmatic formal verification techniques, analysis of open source communities, open data exploitation, and the role AI can play in software development (and vice versa). Together with Gwendal Daniel, he is the co-founder of Xatkit, a generic and extensible platform for developing all kinds of bots and digital assistants.

More information on the website.