Shortage of programmers, high cost and long duration of large-scale software projects,
poor flexibility, modifiability and extendibility of large software systems:
all this have an immense cost to the society.
Existing software development methods critically rely on 1960ies programming language
technology, and do not sufficiently strongly support the development of very large
software systems.
Software, the most basic forms of it in particular, is still manually handcrafted
even when its complexity is not high enough to really justify the high cost of using
human workforce to produce it. There is an ever-increasing need to automate all this work.
The EIAI project is based on ground-breaking new A.I. technologies that will make large software systems more intelligent, more flexible, and far less expensive to produce.
Goals
The technology developed in the project achieves a very high degree of automation
in the production of complex large-scale software systems, primarily in the
information systems category.
Greatly reduced development effort and costs. The projects goal is to achieve a 90+ per cent reduction in the cost of developing large software systems, by largely eliminating the need for routine programming work, and substantially reducing the effort needed for testing and validation.
Increased quality. The opportunities for routine programming errors is largely eliminated. The most expensive category of errors in current industry practice, conceptual errors and incorrect requirement and software specifications, will be easy to fix.
Improved modifiability. The costs and effort of modifying an existing software system are reduced.
Improved intelligence and autonomy. Software systems can be extended with advanced intelligent functionalities (autonomous intelligent decision-making) without ad hoc programming. The need of human users to assist in running the organizational and business processes is reduced, as human decision-making processes can be easily embedded in the software system.
Results
The project has developed a software synthesis method that covers all main parts of
software development for knowledge-intensive information systems, including database management, internal control logic, and user interfaces.
The method is efficient and highly scalable, and hence applicable to systems of very large size.
This is in strong contrast to traditional software synthesis methods investigated in
academic research, which are limited to small programs only, with no or very limited relevance to real-world software production.
The technology has been implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype, which will be developed further to a production-quality system during the TEKES-funded part of the project in 2018. During this phase, the technology will be evaluated in terms of the two main objectives, the reduction in effort and cost of producing software systems, and the quality of the resulting systems in terms of usability, correctness, and performance.
Commercialization of the technology will follow starting in late 2018.
Technology is currently proprietary, with key IP elements being patented.
Project
The project is currently funded by the Technology Development Center of Finland (TEKES) under the TUTL program.
Staff
TEKES funding for 2018 is for a team of computer science and A.I. researchers and a business developer.
Outlook
After the R&D and business development phase in 2018, the project will continue as
a start-up company commercializing the technology starting in 2019.
Contact
The project is looking for academic and industrial partners. Please contact Dr Jussi Rintanen.