dr. Ivano Malavolta

Associate Professor, Faculty of Science, Software and Sustainability (S2)

Associate Professor, Network Institute

Associate Professor, Research Programmes - Science, Software Engineering

Personal information

I am co-lead of the Software and Sustainability research group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Director of the Network Institute (the hub for interdisciplinary research on the Digital Society at VU Amsterdam).

My research focuses on software engineering, with a special emphasis on Green software and software architecture. I apply empirical methods to assess practices and trends in the field of software engineering. I authored more than 200 scientific articles in international journals and peer-reviewed international conference proceedings. I am a program committee member and reviewer of international conferences and journals in the software engineering field. I received a PhD in computer science from the University of L'Aquila in 2012. I am a member of ACM, IEEE, VERSEN, and Amsterdam Data Science. More info at: www.ivanomalavolta.com

Research

I acquired extensive international experience and have a leadership role in the software engineering and robotics areas. I have been Associate Editor of IEEE Software (responsible for the area “Software Design and Architecture”) until 2023, Topic Editor for the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (with permanent appointment), and Associate Editor for the Frontiers in Robotics and AI journal (with permanent appointment). I have been program chair of the European Conference on Software Architecture (rank A) and the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, and program committee member of several top-tier conferences in my and related areas (e.g., ICSE, ranked A*). I regularly receive awards and prizes for my research contributions, including best paper awards at ICSA, ECSA, MODELS, JSS, FGCS (all ranked A), distinguished reviewer award at ICSA, JSS, IST (all ranked A), and many others. Recently, I received the 2024 Dutch Prize for ICT Research for my research on Green Robotics Software; the prize is funded by the ICT research platform Netherlands (IPN), COMMIT\, and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) and nominates the best researcher in the ICT area within the Netherlands.

Teaching

My vision on education heavily relies on a strong synergy between education and research. Indeed, in my courses and theses supervision I always pursue an active involvement of the students in research activities and to engage them with open problems related to relevant research themes. When possible, I design my courses and thesis projects in such a way that the students’ learning path is aligned with the state of the art and that they are continuously exposed to the latest open problems and research challenges.

I have been regularly teaching university courses since 2008 across different universities and research institutes, such as the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands), University of L’Aquila (Italy), Gran Sasso Science Institute (Italy). Among those, I fully designed and taught the following courses: Software Design (Bachelor level), Green Lab (Master level), Mobile Applications Development (Bachelor and Master level - 7 editions), Software Engineering (PhD level - 4 editions).

I am program coordinator of the Software Engineering and Green IT track of the Computer Science Master at VU Amsterdam, a one-of-its-kind program training future generations of IT professionals on developing energy-efficient complex software systems with reduced environmental impact.

I formally supervised more than 10 PhD students. Several of the graduated PhD students are pursuing an academic career in institutions like TUDelft, University of Limerick, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of Pennsylvania, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.

I supervised hundreds of both Bachelor and Master students.

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