Software Engineering Institute

Grace Lewis is a Principal Researcher and the lead for the Tactical and AI-Enabled Systems (TAS) Initiative at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI). She is a Principal Investigator for two projects in the growing field of software engineering for machine-learning (ML) systems: “Characterizing and Detecting Mismatch in ML-Enabled Systems” and “Predicting Inference Degradation in Production ML Systems.” Her current areas of expertise and interest include software engineering for AI/ML systems, software architecture (in particular the development of software architecture practices for systems that integrate emerging technologies), edge computing, and software engineering in society.

Grace holds a B.Sc. in Software Systems Engineering and a Post-Graduate Specialization in Business Administration from Icesi University in Cali, Colombia; a Master in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University; and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Grace is an IEEE Senior Member and very active in IEEE Computer Society committees and conferences. She is currently the VP for the IEEE Computer Society Technical & Conference Activities (T&C) Board, Member of the Board of Governors, Member of the Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Committee, Alternate Representative for IEEE-CS on the ABET CSAB Board of Directors, as well as an ABET Evaluator for Computer Science undergraduate programs.

Extended Biography

Ipek Ozkaya is technical director of the Engineering Intelligent Software Systems group at the SEI. Ozkaya’s primary interests include developing techniques for improving software development efficiency and system evolution with an emphasis on software architecture practices, software economics, and agile development. Ozkaya’s most recent research focuses on building the theoretical and empirical foundations of managing technical debt in large-scale, complex software-intensive systems and software engineering of AI-enabled systems. Ozkaya is editor in chief of IEEE Software magazine and is the coauthor of a practitioner book, Managing Technical Debt, Reducing Friction in Software Development. Ozkaya holds doctoral and master’s degrees in computational design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jay Palat is a software engineer at the SEI Emerging Technology Center and leads engineering efforts for customers and research projects. Before coming to SEI, Palat ran his own consulting company, accelerating engineering teams with a mix of management, best practices, and product engineering. Palat was the Director of Engineering and Senior Director of Data Engineering at Rhiza (now Nielsen) and has successfully led teams to deliver products and services in retail, healthcare, finance, and analytics at companies ranging from IBM to Series A startups.

Nathan R. West in an assistant software engineer on the Tactical and AI-Enabled Systems team at the SEI. He has been with the SEI since 2019. West holds a bachelor of science degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in computer science, and his research interests include data mining and natural language processing.