Call for Papers

Human-Centered AI Transformation for Software Engineering

A special issue of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal. http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/10664

Editors of the Special Issue

Yu Huang, Vanderbilt University, USA
Felix Dobslaw, Mid Sweden University, Sweden
Daye Nam, University of California, Irvine, USA
Zhou Yang, University of Alberta, Canada
Alberto Bacchelli, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Kelly Blincoe, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Thomas Zimmermann, University of California, Irvine, USA
Eriks Klotins, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Davide Fucci, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Lucas Gren, Getinge AB, Sweden

Contact Person

Yu Huang yu.huang@vanderbilt.edu
Felix Dobslaw felix.dobslaw@miun.se
Daye Nam daye.nam@uci.edu
Zhou Yang zy25@ualberta.ca
Alberto Bacchelli bacchelli@ifi.uzh.ch
Kelly Blincoe k.blincoe@auckland.ac.nz
Thomas Zimmermann tzimmer@uci.edu
Eriks Klotins erik.klotins@bth.se
Davide Fucci davide.fucci@bth.se
Lucas Gren lucas.gren@getinge.com

Description of the Special Issue

AI-driven tools are increasingly embedded in software engineering (SE) practice, supporting tasks such as code generation, summarization, testing, and bug detection. Yet these tools have largely been designed around automation and efficiency rather than around the needs, workflows, and cognitive processes of the people who use them. Critical concerns, including bias, transparency, accountability, fairness, governance, and sustainable adoption, remain underexplored, making it essential for the SE community to engage seriously with responsible AI design, deployment, and organizational transformation.

As AI capabilities advance and agentic systems become more prevalent, developers, teams, and organizations must adapt to fundamentally new modes of human-AI interaction. This raises pressing questions about how to build a symbiotic human-AI ecosystem in SE that scales from individual developer workflows to team collaboration and organization-wide change. The future of SE depends on AI that enhances human creativity, productivity, decision-making, learning, and collective capability, not merely one that automates isolated tasks or displaces human judgment.

We invite submissions that investigate the key challenges and opportunities in developing, adopting, evaluating, and governing AI technologies that integrate seamlessly into human-centered SE practice: examining how AI can augment and collaborate with human expertise while ensuring transparency, fairness, ethical development, sustainable organizational adoption, and measurable transformation value.

Topics of Interest

We invite high-quality research that investigates the following (but not limited to) topics:

Knowledge Transfer and Human-Guided AI for SE: Exploring the exchange of knowledge between human and AI systems, focusing on how AI can learn from human expertise and provide insights to developers. Topics may include empirical studies on the needs, preferences, and challenges of providing human feedback, as well as technical approaches for integrating human input to improve SE tasks and empower AI with human guidance.
Human-AI Interaction/Collaboration for SE: Research on how humans and AI systems collaborate during software development. Topics may include empirical studies on how developers use AI tools in practice and interaction models, workflows, and interfaces that enhance the collaboration between developers and AI.
Explainable AI for SE: Research on making AI systems more transparent and understandable for software engineers. Topics may include studies to understand the needs of developers for explainable AI and techniques to improve the interpretability of AI decisions, allowing developers to trust and effectively apply AI in their tasks.
Ethics, Fairness, and Biases in AI-driven Models for SE: Studies addressing the ethical implications of AI in SE, focusing on identifying and mitigating biases in AI-driven tools, ensuring fairness, and establishing ethical standards for AI’s role in software engineering.
SE Education with AI: The role of AI in SE education, including AI-driven tools, intelligent tutoring systems, and methods for integrating AI into SE curricula to enhance learning.
SE Practices for AI: Research on how SE practices can support AI development and maintenance. This includes understanding developer-AI interactions and improving the development process of AI systems leveraging human aspects.
Evaluation of Human-AI systems in SE: Research on the evaluation design for systems that involve Human-AI interactions. For instance, what data needs to be collected to show the long-term effectiveness of such systems.
GenAI Adoption as Organizational Transformation: Research on GenAI adoption as a socio-technical change process in software-intensive organizations. Topics may include leadership, incentives, governance, career paths, resistance to change, and sustainable integration of GenAI into organizational practices.
AI-Embedded Workflows, Roles, and Expertise in SE: Studies on how GenAI and agentic systems reshape software engineering work. Topics may include evolving developer roles, workflow design, productivity, expertise, responsibility, and professional identity in AI-embedded software development.
Team Collaboration and Organizational Learning with AI: Research on how AI-mediated work affects collaboration, onboarding, mentoring, knowledge sharing, and shared understanding in software teams and organizations.
Evaluation of GenAI Transformation in SE: Research on evaluating the impact of GenAI-enabled workflows beyond individual task automation. Topics may include organizational-level outcomes, hidden coordination and verification costs, governance implications, indicators and metrics to scale AI pilots, and longitudinal evidence of transformation value.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2027

Submission Instructions

Papers should be submitted through the Empirical Software Engineering editorial manager website (http://www.editorialmanager.com/emse/) as follows:

Select “Research Papers”
on the Additional Information page: Answer “Yes” to “Does this paper belong to a special issue?” and select “Human-Centered AI Transformation for SE” for “Please select the issue your manuscript belongs to”.

For formatting guidelines as well as submission instructions, visit http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/10664?detailsPage=pltci_2530593