Alessio Ferrari

Alessio Ferrari is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Information Science and Technology 'Alessandro Faedo' (ISTI), part of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Rome, Italy. His research focuses on the intersection of software engineering, requirements engineering, and natural language processing, with particular emphasis on applying computational techniques to improve requirements analysis and specification processes.

Dr. Ferrari received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Florence in 2011. Prior to his research career, he gained valuable industry experience working as a system engineer at General Electric Transportation Systems during his doctoral studies, which has informed his practical approach to research problems.

• Primary Research Areas: Applications of NLP to Requirements Engineering
• User and customer interviews in requirements engineering
• Requirements engineering education and training
• Empirical formal methods and empirical software engineering
• Formal methods applied to railway systems

Dr. Ferrari's recent research shows a strong trend toward leveraging large language models for requirements engineering tasks, including requirements classification, traceability, and modeling. His work increasingly explores the intersection of formal methods and AI approaches in software engineering, particularly in safety-critical domains like railway systems. His publications demonstrate a consistent focus on practical applications of theoretical concepts, with numerous case studies in industrial settings.

Dr. Ferrari has been actively involved in several European research projects, including DESIRA and CODECS on sustainability, ASTRail (where he served as Work Package leader), Learn PAd, and 4SecuRail. He has made significant contributions to the requirements engineering community through his service as Program Chair of REFSQ 2023, founder of the NLP4RE workshop series, and Artifact Evaluation Chair for multiple conferences including FormaliSE 2023, RE 2022, and iFM 2022.

As leader of the Formal Methods and Tools lab at CNR-ISTI, Dr. Ferrari oversees research on applying formal methods to railway systems and developing innovative tools for requirements engineering. He is highly committed to open science initiatives and has been instrumental in promoting replication studies in requirements engineering research. His educational contributions include the SaPeer approach for training requirements analysts and the ModeLLer tool for supporting requirements elicitation in co-design environments.