Our vision on AI and software engineering

In our daily life, AI is present in many fields, from medicine to automotive and industry… AI itself is a very vast field gathering several subfields. In recent years we have seen great advances in AI and software engineering.  

Software engineering is the science of industrial engineering which allows to study methods and good practices that engineers must follow to create quality software by minimizing the time to market.

The alliance between AI and software engineering 

One of the biggest advances in recent years in the NLP (Natural Language Processing) subfield of AI are the Transformer models.   

Transformers (self-attentive) is a deep learning model introduced in 2017 for modeling natural language. It allows a machine (computer) to understand, classify and generate natural language text. Transformers uses an attention mechanism that allows to process data in parellel faster than other approaches used before in natural language processing (case of recurrent neural networks: RNN).   

The Transformer can be used in different cases: translation, text summary, text generation, identification of named entities (places, cities, people’s names, ….), as it can be used in Question/Answer type tasks.

At Novelis we use this model to illustrate the understanding of a specification, which earned us the first place in the international challenge organized by Microsoft: the CodeXGlue challenge.   

Improving the understanding of needs described in natural language, giving the machine the possibility to design and develop computing solutions, algorithms, parts of applications based on natural language description represents one of our biggest research works. 

We want to advance the science of artificial developers that can assist human developers in their daily development tasks. The goal is to remove low value-added tasks for developers to allow them to refocus on tasks requiring human appreciation, more complex. It will never be a question of replacing them, but of assisting them.   

In this sense, we are working on a program to design and implement artificial developers: AIDA. 

Another example of the application of AI in software construction within Novelis is image processing: we are able to generate the graphical interfaces of applications from images describing the screens of these applications. We are working on the implementation of an AI that will generate the computer code to create the HMI (Human Machine Interface).