As business becomes more dynamic with rapidly evolving goals of stakeholders accompanied by unforeseen and uncertain environment factors, the supporting software systems too need to dynamically evolve in a uniquely non-invasive way to meet requirements and goals of every stakeholder. With increasing pervasiveness of software, this need will be felt ever more acutely and across all business verticals. While considerable progress has been made by [self- ]adaptive software community in meeting the adaptation needs pertaining to executing machinery, there is little work reported on adaptation of business functionality and processes. Several conceptual architectures are proposed but they have not been demonstrated to effectively address industry scale problems. State of the art of [self] adaptive software addresses known knowns and known unknowns leaving out unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. We think the latter can be addressed through an inbuilt capability of software to observe its environment, learn, bring in new knowledge, synthesize from past actions, and to tune itself to be able to fulfil the possibly interfering needs of various stakeholders in a dynamic contextual setting. The talk will motivate the topic, survey the state of art, propose a line of attack, and discuss it feasibility while also identifying open challenges.

Vinay Kulkarni is Distinguished Chief Scientist at TCS Research where he heads Software Systems & Services research. His research interests include digital twins, adaptive enterprises, learning-native software systems, and model-driven software engineering. At present, exploring feasibility of future proofing enterprises with modelling, simulation, and analytics. The vision is to integrate modelling, AI, and control theory to support dynamic adaptation of complex systems of systems using digital twins. This research takes into consideration two hitherto less addressed aspects of partial information and inherent uncertainty. Also started investigating programming language, architecture, and execution support to realize learning-native software systems. Prior work focused on making software development an engineering endeavour with a-priori guarantees about properties such as correctness, scalability, productivity, maintainability etc. Involved in development of automation tools and method using model-based techniques that are used by industry for past several years. Much of this work has found way into international standards, three of which Vinay contributed to in a leadership role. Vinay has several patents to his credit and has authored 150+ publications in scholastic journals and conferences worldwide. He has served as the conference and program chairperson for the premier ACM and IEEE international conferences in software engineering; and is on technical program committees of many international conferences. Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, Vinay is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology Madras and serves as Visiting Professor at Middlesex University London, and Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.