Inter-university research centre for software engineering research for the digital society

About

SERIQ is an inter-university research centre in software engineering. It continues the SEMTL meetings, held in Montréal for more than ten years.

Mission

The Centre develops software engineering research that supports the digital transformation of science and society. That research is organised around four complementary axes addressing the challenges of modern software development.

The Centre has four partner institutions. Further universities may join the inter-university agreement.

  • Faculty of Arts and Science

  • Faculty of Engineering Faculty of Science

The Centre's mission also covers the following:

  • integrating the training of students and postdoctoral fellows into its scientific activities, and developing career prospects for early-career scientists;
  • exchanging, collaborating and building lasting partnerships with the business community and the public sector;
  • cooperating with other organisations working in human-centred interdisciplinary software research, in Canada and worldwide.

Steering committee

The committee is chaired by the Centre's director and brings together the co-leaders of the research axes.

Research axes

The four axes share a common foundation: software engineering — requirements, modelling, testing, integration, security.

  1. Cyber-physical systems

    Software is no longer confined to purely digital systems; it is embedded in physical, biological and social contexts. Digital twins, the internet of things, operating systems.

  2. Ecosystem and infrastructure

    Software infrastructure now rests on shared platforms and heterogeneous supply chains. Software supply chain, cloud and high-performance computing, product lines.

  3. Architecture and design

    Designing a system does not rest on computing expertise alone; it also involves domain specialists. Low-code, domain-specific modelling, requirements engineering.

  4. Human aspects

    People remain at the centre of software systems, as users, operators and designers. Accessibility, human-computer interaction, documentation.

Cross-cutting axes

Four concerns run across the four axes rather than belonging to any one of them.

  • AI

    • AI for software engineering
    • Software engineering for AI

  • Application domains

    • Science
    • Finance
    • Transport
    • Infrastructure
    • Civil society
    • Culture
    • Industry
    • Health
    • Aerospace

  • Concerns and qualities

    • Security
    • Reliability
    • Adaptability
    • Performance
    • Sovereignty
    • Transparency

  • Knowledge transfer

    • Scientific audiences
    • Industrial audiences
    • Governments
    • General public

From SEMTL meetings to the SERIQ centre

SEMTL (Software Engineering at Montreal) has brought together Montréal's software engineering research community for more than ten years. The online record begins in 2019: seven meetings that year, then two in early 2020, before the pandemic interrupted them.

Meetings resumed in August 2022, roughly every two months. The six Montréal universities have hosted and supported them in turn, and some have been held alongside conferences such as ICSE and SEMLA.

Group discussions among SEMTL members also produced a vision paper, presented in the main track at MODELS 2024.

In October 2026, SEMTL becomes SERIQ. The meeting series continues. The centre extends across Québec and organises its research around the four axes above.