Douglas Schmidt

Daniel Otten, Trevor Stalnaker, Nathan Wintersgill et al.

Although tension between university curricula and industry expectations has existed in some form for decades, the rapid integration of generative AI (GenAI) tools into software development has recently widened the gap between the two domains. To better understand this disconnect, we surveyed 51 industry practitioners (software developers, technical leads, upper management, \etc) and conducted 11 follow-up interviews focused on hiring practices, required job skills, perceived shortcomings in university curricula, and views on how university learning outcomes can be improved. Our results suggest that GenAI creates demand for new skills (\eg prompting and output evaluation), while strengthening the importance of soft-skills (\eg problem solving and critical thinking) and traditional competencies (\eg architecture design and debugging). We synthesize these findings into actionable recommendations for academia (\eg how to incorporate GenAI into curricula and evaluation redesign). Our work offers empirical guidance to help educators prepare students for modern software engineering environments.

Aron Laszka, Abhishek Dubey, Michael Walker et al.

Power grids are undergoing major changes due to rapid growth in renewable energy resources and improvements in battery technology. While these changes enhance sustainability and efficiency, they also create significant management challenges as the complexity of power systems increases. To tackle these challenges, decentralized Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions are emerging, which arrange local communities into transactive microgrids. Within a transactive microgrid, "prosumers" (i.e., consumers with energy generation and storage capabilities) can trade energy with each other, thereby smoothing the load on the main grid using local supply. It is hard, however, to provide security, safety, and privacy in a decentralized and transactive energy system. On the one hand, prosumers' personal information must be protected from their trade partners and the system operator. On the other hand, the system must be protected from careless or malicious trading, which could destabilize the entire grid. This paper describes Privacy-preserving Energy Transactions (PETra), which is a secure and safe solution for transactive microgrids that enables consumers to trade energy without sacrificing their privacy. PETra builds on distributed ledgers, such as blockchains, and provides anonymity for communication, bidding, and trading.