IDeaLS Lab
Intelligent Development and Large-Scale Systems Lab
Artificial Intelligence · Software Engineering · Intelligent Systems · Cyber-Physical Systems
Building the next generation of intelligent, trustworthy, and autonomous computing systems
The IDeaLS Lab (Intelligent Development and Large-Scale Systems Lab) investigates how Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Data Science, and Cyber-Physical Systems can be combined to develop the next generation of intelligent and trustworthy computing systems.
Led by Dr. Sebastiano Panichella, the lab brings together researchers working across Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Generative AI, Software Engineering, Data Science, MLOps, Cloud Computing, and Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems.
Our research addresses both fundamental scientific challenges and real-world industrial needs. We develop methods, technologies, and tools that help intelligent systems become more reliable, trustworthy, explainable, testable, scalable, and autonomous throughout their lifecycle.
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Research Areas
AI for Software Engineering & Software Engineering for AI
LLMs and AI agents that change how software is developed, tested and maintained, and engineering principles that make AI systems reliable and reproducible.
Trustworthy AI & Intelligent Systems
Methods for AI-enabled systems that are reliable, transparent, robust and safe, from trustworthy generative AI to explainability and evaluation.
Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems & Robotics
Safe and dependable autonomy for drones, robots, autonomous vehicles, smart mobility and intelligent infrastructures.
AI Engineering, MLOps, DevOps & Cloud Computing
Pipelines for building, testing, deploying and monitoring AI-intensive and large-scale software systems.
Data-driven Software Engineering & Empirical Research
Empirical studies on software repositories, developer data and experiments that lead to evidence-based tools for software quality.
Explore our research
Research directions, ecosystem, partners and impact.
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Featured Work
Recent work presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026) in Vienna.
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In the Lab
Robots and drones we use for experiments, from drone swarms to robot fleets and arms. Each clip links to its code on GitHub.
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News
ICST 2027 UAV Perception Testing Track: tool submissions open
Build test generators that make an autonomous drone fail in Isaac Sim. Organized by the lab with the University of Bern; deadline 15 January 2027.
Dr. Sebastiano Panichella appointed Head of the IDeaLS Lab
The Intelligent Development and Large-Scale Systems Lab at AI4I works on intelligent, adaptive and trustworthy software systems.
National Scientific Habilitation in Computer Science
Dr. Panichella obtained the Italian National Scientific Habilitation (ASN), I Fascia, for 01/B1 Informatica.
Paper accepted at ESEM 2026
Characterising Meeting Practices in Software Engineering Teams, accepted in the ESEM 2026 Technical Track.
Third place at the first Hack Apertus hackathon
Team INVINCIBLES with Prakash Aryan placed third in Liebefeld with Parlamentsthemen, topic classification of Swiss parliamentary affairs with Apertus.
Two papers presented at ICRA 2026
Work on multi-agent reinforcement learning for safe driving and on MR-SLAM presented in Vienna.