Staff profile

Looking for a PhD ?

Potential new PhD students: having good PhD students can be super rewarding! I am always interested in receiving new good PhD Students. Contact me to talk about your research proposals, academic visits or scholarships.

PhD Funding Opportunities: 

NEWS (March 2023): The Durham CS Department offers several PhD studentships (some National and 4 International). You would need the interview and offer soon. Please contact me Email me if interested.

---> There are always funding opportunities offered (in Durham and other sources. <--- It is about being ready for when they appear). Therefore, a good step is to apply for a PhD as soon as possible. Contact me if you want to get the instructions to start your application.

If you bring your own research funding, we can chat (contact me if interested)

Research and Biography

I exploit the interdisciplinary aspects of software engineering, comprising both technical and human concerns while developing techniques for intelligent, autonomous and highly distributed systems.

I am an Associate Professor in the CS Department at Durham University. Earlier, I was a Senior Lecturer (equiv. Associate Professor) in the Computer Science Department at Aston University. From September 2020 I am the PI of the EPSRC Twenty20Insight research project. In 2019 I was granted the Leverhulme Fellowship "QuantUn: quantification of uncertainty using Bayesian surprises." Before, I was a Marie Curie Fellow at INRIA Paris - Roquencourt. The Marie Curie project is called Requirements-aware Systems (nickname: Requirements@run.time). Before, that I was a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University (UK) where I also got my PhD.

Publications:
Google Scholar citations  DBLP  Scopus

Research Projects:

Current and Recent Projects

– EPSRC Research Twenty20Insight (EPSRC link) (2020-2024) Principal Investigator, £892,384 (total Value to Aston and then Durham £586,520) website Twenty20Insight

- ALTS: AI-enabled Legal Technologies and their Consequences on Society (PI N Bencomo, Co-PIs W Lucy and M Hardey)(2023-24). Partially funded by the Institute of Advance Studies and the EPSRC.

– iDecide: Quantifying Uncertainty in Models using Artificial Intelligence for Personalised and Shared Decision-Making in Digital Health. (Jun- Aug 2023)

– ERiMA: Envisioning Risk Models for Assessment of AI-based applications (Sept-Nov 2023)

Past Research Projects

- Research Fellowship by Leverhulme Trust “QuantUn: Quantification of Uncertainty using Bayesian Surprises” (2019-2020)

– ReqModAI Requirements Models for Artificial Intelligence: Framework and Casestudy (Jul- Nov 2022)

- Marie Curie Action Intra-European Fellowship requirements@runtime: Requirements-aware Systems, €222.547, Inria, France, (2011-2013)

- 2 VC international PhD scholarships, Aston University, (2018)

- Faculty PhD scholarship, Aston University (2015)

- Visiting Scholar Funding 2015, Aston University

- M@TURE Models @ run Time for self-adaptive pervasive systems: enabling User-in-the-loop, REquirement-awareness, and interoperability in ad hoc settings, 24-month, Inria-funded international collaboration grant (Brazil-France). We also won a second version (2014-2016) 

Awards / Rewards:

- 10 year Most Influential Paper Award 2019, "RELAX: Incorporating Uncertainty into the Specification of Self-Adaptive Systems", by Jon Whittle, Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, Betty H.C. Cheng, Jean-Michel Bruel, Proceedings of 17th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE09), pp. 7988, September 2009, Atlanta, Georgia.

- 10 year Most Influential Paper Award 2019, "A Goal-Based Modeling Approach to Develop Requirements of an Adaptive System with Environmental Uncertainty" by Betty H.C. Cheng, Pete Sawyer, Nelly Bencomo, Jon Whittle, in the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MoDELS 2009), pp. 468483, Denver, Colorado, 2009.

- Best Paper Award REFSQ 2013: "Supporting Decision-making for Self-adaptive Systems: From Goal Models to Dynamic Decision Networks" by N. Bencomo, A. Belaggoun 

Current and Previous PhD Students

- Owen Reynold, since January 2019 (co-supervision with Antonio Garcia)

 Students under my supervision in the past:

- Huma Samin, since April 2019 (co-supervision with Pete Sawyer). Graduated Nov 2022. Now a Post Doc at Durham University

- Juan Marcelo Parra, since October 2018 (co-supervision with Antonio Garcia). Graduated, December 2022. Now a Post Doc at Bristol University

- Luis Hernan Garcia Paucar, PhD, Graduated, March 2020. Now working at Aston University

- Amel Belaggoun, Master Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and TELECOM SudParis and Inria, France, Graduated 2013

 - Ross Edwards, 2018

Miscellaneous

in other words, what is really important!

In Durham, I am planning to enjoy Durham County, Scotland and the Lake District among other beautiful places in the North and East of the UK :)

During my time in Birmingham, I was not working I liked walking on the hills (the Malvern Hills, Snowdonia) or running, or perhaps dancing or taking pictures or hanging around with my family and friends and of course Talisker my dog. I enjoy running by the canal in Birmingham. I wish I could have more time for these activities.

During my time in Paris, I used to go to Museums & Cafes :) if my daughter did not decide something else. I also did some exercise with my dog running near Inria and by the river Seine in Paris. Happy days!

I love eating good food and I am MAD about sushi. I LOVE chocolate, BTW dark and bitter chocolate, if it is not at least 75% Cocoa that is not chocolate :). If chocolate is from Venezuela even better!

• decision making under uncertainty
• autonomous systems
• runtime models
• AI/ML
• Software Engineering
• Software Engineering for Autonomous and Self-adaptive Systems
• Software Engineering for AI/ML Systems

• 2022: 2022: Member of the IEEE TCSE (22-24): I was elected again to be part of the IEEE TCSE Executive Committee
  
  
• 2022: PC Co-Chair MODELS 2022 :
• 2020: Member of the IEEE TCSE: Member of the IEEE TCSE (Technical Council on Software Engineering) members-at-large (TCSE Elected Officers 2020- )
• 2019: Associate Editor of IEEE TSE: Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) (2019-Present)
• 2019: Member of Editor Board of SoSym: Member of Editor Board of Software and Systems Modeling (2019- )
• 2018: Member of Editor Board of JSERD:
  Member of Editor Board of Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development ;JSERD ;(2018 - )

Available for media contact about:

• Computer Science:

Conference Paper

• Parra-Ullauri, Juan, Garcia-Dominguez, Antonio, Bencomo, Nelly & Garcia Paucar, Luis (2022), History-aware explanations: towards enabling human-in-the-loop in self-adaptive systems, MODELS '22: 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. Montreal, Quebec, ACM.
• Sutcliffe, Alistair Sawyer, Pete & Bencomo, Nelly (2022), The Implications of ‘Soft’ Requirements, in Knauss, Eric, Mussbacher, Gunter Arora, Chetan, Bano, Muneera & Schneider, Jean-Guy eds, IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). Melbourne, IEEE, 178-188.
• Garcia-Paucar, Luis, Bencomo, Nelly, Sutcliffe, Alistair & Sawyer, Pete (2022), A Bayesian Network-based model to understand the role of soft requirements in technology acceptance: the Case of the NHS COVID-19 Test and Trace App in England and Wales, 37th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM SAC'2022). Brno, ACM, 1327-1336.
• Alistair G. Sutcliffe, Pete Sawyer, Wei Liu & Nelly Bencomo (2021), Investigating the Potential Impact of Values on Requirements and Software Engineering, 43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society, ICSE (SEIS) 2021, Madrid, Spain, May 25-28, 2021. IEEE, 39-47.
• Juan Marcelo Parra Ullauri, Antonio García-Domínguez, Juan Boubeta-Puig, Nelly Bencomo & Guadalupe Ortiz (2021), Towards an architecture integrating complex event processing and temporal graphs for service monitoring, in Chih-Cheng Hung, Jiman Hong, Alessio Bechini & Eunjee Song eds, SAC '21: The 36th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, Virtual Event, Republic of Korea, March 22-26, 2021. ACM, 427-435.
• Nelly Bencomo, Rachel Harrison & Daniel Rodríguez (2021), Eigth International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Requirements Engineering (AIRE'21), in Tao Yue & Mehdi Mirakhorli eds, 29th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops, RE 2021 Workshops, Notre Dame, IN, USA, September 20-24, 2021. IEEE, 58-59.
• Huma Samin, Luis Hernán García Paucar, Nelly Bencomo & Peter Sawyer (2021), Towards priority-awareness in autonomous intelligent systems, in Chih-Cheng Hung, Jiman Hong, Alessio Bechini & Eunjee Song eds, SAC '21: The 36th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, Virtual Event, Republic of Korea, March 22-26, 2021. ACM, 1328-1337.
• Huma Samin, Nelly Bencomo & Peter Sawyer (2021), Pri-AwaRE: Tool Support for priority-aware decision-making under uncertainty, 29th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2021, Notre Dame, IN, USA, September 20-24, 2021. IEEE, 450-451.
• Nelly Bencomo (2021), Modeling Autonomic Systems in the time of ML, DevOps and Microservices, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion, MODELS 2021 Companion, Fukuoka, Japan, October 10-15, 2021. IEEE, 731.
• Juan Marcelo Parra Ullauri, Antonio García-Domínguez & Nelly Bencomo (2021), From a Series of (Un)fortunate Events to Global Explainability of Runtime Model-Based Self-Adaptive Systems, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion, MODELS 2021 Companion, Fukuoka, Japan, October 10-15, 2021. IEEE, 807-816.
• Antonio Bucchiarone, Antonio Cicchetti, Nelly Bencomo, Enrica Loria & Annapaola Marconi (2021), Gamified and Self-Adaptive Applications for the Common Good: Research Challenges Ahead, 16th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, SEAMS@ICSE 2021, Madrid, Spain, May 18-24, 2021. IEEE, 149-155.
• Luis Hernán García Paucar, Nelly Bencomo & Alistair G. Sutcliffe (2021), Towards Technology Acceptance: a Bayesian Network of soft requirements, the case of the NHS COVID-19 Test and Trace App, in Tao Yue & Mehdi Mirakhorli eds, 29th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops, RE 2021 Workshops, Notre Dame, IN, USA, September 20-24, 2021. IEEE, 146-152.
• Huma Samin, Luis Hernán García Paucar, Nelly Bencomo, Cesar M. Carranza Hurtado & Erik M. Fredericks (2021), RDMSim: An Exemplar for Evaluation and Comparison of Decision-Making Techniques for Self-Adaptation, 16th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, SEAMS@ICSE 2021, Madrid, Spain, May 18-24, 2021. IEEE, 238-244.
• Gunter Mussbacher, Benoît Combemale, Silvia Abrahão, Nelly Bencomo, Loli Burgueño, Gregor Engels, Jörg Kienzle, Thomas Kühn, Sébastien Mosser, Houari A. Sahraoui & Martin Weyssow (2020), Towards an assessment grid for intelligent modeling assistance, in Esther Guerra & Ludovico Iovino eds, MODELS '20: ACM/IEEE 23rd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Virtual Event, Canada, 18-23 October, 2020, Companion Proceedings. ACM, 48:1-48:10.
• Antonio Bucchiarone, Nelly Bencomo, Enrica Loria, Annapaola Marconi & Antonio Cicchetti (2020), Run-time and Collective Adaptation of Gameful Systems, 2020 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems, ACSOS 2020, Companion Volume, Washington, DC, USA, August 17-21, 2020. IEEE, 145-146.
• Nelly Bencomo (2020), Next steps in variability management due to autonomous behaviour and runtime learning, in Maxime Cordy, Mathieu Acher, Danilo Beuche & Gunter Saake eds, VaMoS '20: 14th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems, Magdeburg Germany, February 5-7, 2020. ACM, 2:1-2:2.
• Juan Marcelo Parra Ullauri, Antonio García-Domínguez, Luis Hernán García Paucar & Nelly Bencomo (2020), Temporal Models for History-Aware Explainability, in Abdelouahed Gherbi, Wahab Hamou-Lhadj & Ahmed Bali eds, SAM '20: 12th System Analysis and Modelling Conference, Virtual Event, Canada, October 19-20, 2020. ACM, 155-164.
• Owen Reynolds, Antonio García-Domínguez & Nelly Bencomo (2020), Automated provenance graphs for models@run.time, in Esther Guerra & Ludovico Iovino eds, MODELS '20: ACM/IEEE 23rd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Virtual Event, Canada, 18-23 October, 2020, Companion Proceedings. ACM, 53:1-53:10.
• Antonio García-Domínguez, Nelly Bencomo, Juan Marcelo Parra Ullauri & Luis Hernán García Paucar (2019), Towards History-Aware Self-Adaptation with Explanation Capabilities, IEEE 4th International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems, FAS*W@SASO/ICCAC 2019, Umea, Sweden, June 16-20, 2019. IEEE, 18-23.
• Luis Hernán García Paucar & Nelly Bencomo (2019), Knowledge Base K Models to Support Trade-Offs for Self-Adaptation using Markov Processes, 13th IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, SASO 2019, Umea, Sweden, June 16-20, 2019. IEEE, 11-16.
• Nelly Bencomo & Luis Hernán García Paucar (2019), RaM: Causally-Connected and Requirements-Aware Runtime Models using Bayesian Learning, in Marouane Kessentini, Tao Yue, Alexander Pretschner, Sebastian Voss & Loli Burgueño eds, 22nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS 2019, Munich, Germany, September 15-20, 2019. IEEE, 216-226.
• Nelly Bencomo, Gunter Mussbacher, Ana Moreira, João Araújo & Pablo Sánchez (2019), Preface to 9th International Workshop on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering, 27th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops, RE 2019 Workshops, Jeju Island, Korea (South), September 23-27, 2019. IEEE, 12-13.
• Antonio García-Domínguez, Nelly Bencomo, Juan Marcelo Parra Ullauri & Luis Hernán García Paucar (2019), Querying and Annotating Model Histories with Time-Aware Patterns, in Marouane Kessentini, Tao Yue, Alexander Pretschner, Sebastian Voss & Loli Burgueño eds, 22nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS 2019, Munich, Germany, September 15-20, 2019. IEEE, 194-204.
• Miguel A. Jiménez, Luis F. Rivera, Norha M. Villegas, Gabriel Tamura, Hausi A. Müller & Nelly Bencomo (2019), An architectural framework for quality-driven adaptive continuous experimentation, Proceedings of the Joint 4th International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering and 1st International Workshop on Data-Driven Decisions, Experimentation and Evolution, RCoSE-DDrEE@ICSE 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 27, 2019. IEEE / ACM, 20-23.
• Luis Hernán García Paucar, Nelly Bencomo & Kevin Kam Fung Yuen (2019), ARRoW: automatic runtime reappraisal of weights for self-adaptation, in Chih-Cheng Hung & George A. Papadopoulos eds, Proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2019, Limassol, Cyprus, April 8-12, 2019. ACM, 1584-1591.
• Bencomo, Nelly, Belaggoun, Amel & Issarny, Valérie (2013), Dynamic decision networks for decision-making in self-adaptive systems: a case study, in Litoiu, Marin & Mylopoulos, John eds, Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, SEAMS 2013, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 20-21, 2013. San Francisco, CA, IEEE Computer Society, 113-122.
• Romina Torres, Nelly Bencomo & Hernán Astudillo (2013), Addressing the QoS drift in specification models of self-adaptive service-based systems, 2nd International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering, RAISE 2013, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 25-26, 2013. IEEE Computer Society, 28-34.
• Rogério de Lemos, David Garlan, Carlo Ghezzi, Holger Giese, Jesper Andersson, Marin Litoiu, Bradley R. Schmerl, Danny Weyns, Luciano Baresi, Nelly Bencomo, Yuriy Brun, Javier Cámara, Radu Calinescu, Myra B. Cohen, Alessandra Gorla, Vincenzo Grassi, Lars Grunske, Paola Inverardi, Jean-Marc Jézéquel, Sam Malek, Raffaela Mirandola, Marco Mori, Hausi A. Müller, Romain Rouvoy, Cecília M. F. Rubira, Éric Rutten, Mary Shaw, Giordano Tamburrelli, Gabriel Tamura, Norha M. Villegas, Thomas Vogel & Franco Zambonelli (2013), Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: Research Challenges in the Provision of Assurances, in Rogério de Lemos, David Garlan, Carlo Ghezzi & Holger Giese eds, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9640: Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances - International Seminar, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, December 15-19, 2013, Revised Selected and Invited Papers. Springer, 3-30.
• Bencomo, Nelly & Belaggoun, Amel (2013), Supporting Decision-Making for Self-Adaptive Systems: From Goal Models to Dynamic Decision Networks, in Dörr, Jörg & Opdahl, Andreas L. eds, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7830: Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality - 19th International Working Conference, REFSQ 2013, Essen, Germany, April 8-11, 2013. Proceedings. Springer, 221-236.
• Nelly Bencomo, Amel Belaggoun & Valérie Issarny (2013), Bayesian artificial intelligence for tackling uncertainty in self-adaptive systems: The case of dynamic decision networks, 2nd International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering, RAISE 2013, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 25-26, 2013. IEEE Computer Society, 7-13.

Journal Article

• Camara, Javier Troya1, Javier Vallecillo, Antonio, Bencomo, Nelly Calinescu, Radu, Cheng, Betty, David Garlan & Schmerl, Bradley (2022). The Uncertainty Interaction Problem in Self-Adaptive Systems. Software and Systems Modeling 21(4): 1277-1294.
• Samin, Huma, Bencomo, Nelly & Sawyer, Pete (2022). Decision-Making under Uncertainty: Be Aware of your Priorities. Software and Systems Modeling 21(6): 2213–2242.
• Parra-Ullauri, Juan Marcelo, Garcıa-Domınguez, Antonio, Bencomo, Nelly, Zheng, Changgang, Zhen, Chen, Boubeta-Puig, Juan Ortiz, Guadalupe & Yang, Shufan (2022). Event-driven Temporal Models for Explanations - ETeMoX: Explaining Reinforcement Learning. Software and Systems Modeling 21(3): 1091-1113.
• Reynolds, Owen García-Domínguez, Antonio & Bencomo, Nelly (2022). Cronista: a multi-database automated provenance collection system for runtime models. Information and Software Technology 141: 106694.
• Bencomo, Nelly, Guo, Jin, Harrison, Rachel, Heyn, Hans-Martin & Menzies, Tim (2022). The Secret to Better AI and Better Software (Is Requirements Engineering). IEEE Software 39(1): 105-110.
• Benoît Combemale, Jörg Kienzle, Gunter Mussbacher, Hyacinth Ali, Daniel Amyot, Mojtaba Bagherzadeh, Edouard Batot, Nelly Bencomo, Benjamin Benni, Jean-Michel Bruel, Jordi Cabot, Betty H. C. Cheng, Philippe Collet, Gregor Engels, Robert Heinrich, Jean-Marc Jézéquel, Anne Koziolek, Sébastien Mosser, Ralf H. Reussner, Houari A. Sahraoui, Rijul Saini, June Sallou, Serge Stinckwich, Eugene Syriani & Manuel Wimmer (2021). A Hitchhiker's Guide to Model-Driven Engineering for Data-Centric Systems. IEEE Softw 38(4): 71-84.
• Changgang Zheng, Shufan Yang, Juan Marcelo Parra Ullauri, Antonio García-Domínguez & Nelly Bencomo (2021). Reward-Reinforced Reinforcement Learning for Multi-agent Systems. CoRR abs/2103.12192.
• Antonio Bucchiarone, Martina De Sanctis & Nelly Bencomo (2021). Agent-Based Framework for Self-Organization of Collective and Autonomous Shuttle Fleets. IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst 22(6): 3631-3643.
• Jörg Kienzle, Gunter Mussbacher, Benoît Combemale, Lucy Bastin, Nelly Bencomo, Jean-Michel Bruel, Christoph Becker, Stefanie Betz, Ruzanna Chitchyan, Betty H. C. Cheng, Sonja Klingert, Richard F. Paige, Birgit Penzenstadler, Norbert Seyff, Eugene Syriani & Colin C. Venters (2020). Toward model-driven sustainability evaluation. Commun. ACM 63(3): 80-91.
• Gunter Mussbacher, Benoît Combemale, Jörg Kienzle, Silvia Abrahão, Hyacinth Ali, Nelly Bencomo, Márton Búr, Loli Burgueño, Gregor Engels, Pierre Jeanjean, Jean-Marc Jézéquel, Thomas Kühn, Sébastien Mosser, Houari A. Sahraoui, Eugene Syriani, Dániel Varró & Martin Weyssow (2020). Opportunities in intelligent modeling assistance. Softw. Syst. Model 19(5): 1045-1053.
• Nelly Bencomo, Sebastian Götz & Hui Song (2019). Models@run.time: a guided tour of the state of the art and research challenges. Softw. Syst. Model 18(5): 3049-3082.
• Danny Weyns, Nelly Bencomo, Radu Calinescu, Javier Cámara, Carlo Ghezzi, Vincenzo Grassi, Lars Grunske, Paola Inverardi, Jean-Marc Jézéquel, Sam Malek, Raffaela Mirandola, Marco Mori & Giordano Tamburrelli (2019). Perpetual Assurances for Self-Adaptive Systems. CoRR abs/1903.04771.