Top software engineering researchers descend on Limerick for hackathon

SOME of the world’s top software engineering researchers descended on Limerick city at weekend for the World of Code Hackathon.

The event was hosted at Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, which is located at University of Limerick.

According to Lero Director Prof Brian Fitzgerald, the hackathon was a great opportunity for Limerick students to showcase their abilities on a world stage. “The World of Code is the most significant software codebase globally with contributions from more than 50 million developers. Lero is delighted to have been chosen to host the hackathon on the World of Code – a first for Europe."

The two-day hackathon, Prof Fitzgerald explained, was a sprint-like design event where experts in the world of computer programming collaborate intensively on software projects with the goal of creating a functioning software prototype by the close of the event.

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Dr Tapajit Dey, a postdoctoral research fellow at Lero and a former student of Dr Audris Mockus, the creator of World of Code, played an instrumental role in hosting the hackathon at Lero. 

Dr Mockus, who works at Meta - the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp - visited the hackathon where he met with some of the participants.

He is  Professor of Digital Archaeology and Evidence Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Tennessee and a well-known figure in the field of software engineering research for his seminal work on open source software.

Attendees at the hackathon also participated in the annual  ‘mining challenge’ competition organised by the Mining Software Repositories conference, a well-known conference in the software engineering world.

Several projects in previous World of Code Hackathons have resulted in the publication of academic papers at prestigious conferences worldwide.