First CASTOR Software Days provided a meeting point for research and industry

Published Oct 24, 2019

At CASTOR Software days, software researchers, engineers and students met to present and discuss cutting-edge technology and current challenges in the three areas: DevOps, Security and Large-Scale Distributed Systems. The days were a mix of keynotes, academic and industry talks, demos and lightning talks which were organised by the CASTOR software research centre. It was the first incarnation of an annual series of events.

The event attracted more than 200 guests, a mix of attendants from the industry, KTH and Swedish Universities. Among the participating companies were Spotify, ABB, Klarna and iZettle as well as the centre's founding partners Saab and Ericsson. Dimitra Giannakopoulou from NASA, Polhem Award winner Daniel Stenberg from cURL and Sahar Asadi who is working with AI at King were some of the participating speakers. Also, several KTH researchers spoke at the event, such as Laila Bahri, Senior Researcher at KTH, Elena Troubitsyna, Associate Professor of computer science at KTH and Pontus Johnson, Professor of cyber security and software architecture at KTH.

To visualise software and the fact that software is an essential part of society, a hackathon was arranged in the reactor hall as part of the Software days. The hackathon aimed to visualise software through art and was joined by students from Hyperisland, Konstfack and KTH, as well as software developers from the Stockholm software industry.

Showcase the great software technology in Stockholm

KTH runs the CASTOR research centre together with Ericsson and Saab, and aims to provide a space where research and industry meet, with the purpose to achieve eminent research within software technology.

Some of the guests have commented on the event:

“Reliable software is crucial to all aspects of modern society, from access to food and heating to healthcare, communications, transportation, military defence and, of course, economic productivity. Most of the vulnerabilities found in critical software today originate from the fact that developing good systems is too difficult. CASTOR represents an important investment in improving the possibilities of developing stable software", says Pontus Johnson, Professor of cyber security and software architecture at KTH.

“Initiatives such as the Software Days are important to give researchers and industry the opportunity to share experiences and hear about new processes, tools and insights in software development. It is important to continue to put Sweden on the map as a country that can develop useful software products, such as Swish and Spotify, that are being used across the world. This is fantastic and shows how competent we are in Sweden despite being such a small country,” Ingela Persson, DevOps Team Lead, Saab Surveillance

“The Castor Software days have been an excellent platform to get connected with the software developer community across leading Swedish academia and industry. There was a lot of inspiring content, both in presentations, but also during personal discussions,” Wolfgang John, Research Leader, Ericsson.

“I am extremely happy about the mix of academia and industry talks and the technical quality of all the talks. We have explored three key areas of software technology in detail and had very good discussions about the challenges and latest results in these areas. I want to say thank you to all participants and speakers for joining us and I hope we see you next year”, says Benoit Baudry, Professor at KTH.