Abstract: Researchers in software engineering must communicate with industry practitioners, both engineers and managers. Communication may be about collaboration buy-in, problem identification, empirical data collection, solution design, evaluation, and reporting. In order to gain mutual benefit of the collaboration, ensuring relevant research and improved industry practice, researchers and practitioners must be good at communicating. The basis for a researcher to be good at industry-academia communication is firstly to be “bi-lingual”. The terminology in each domain is often different and the number of TLA:s (Three Letter Abbreviations) in industry is overwhelming. Understanding and being able to translate between these “languages” is essential. Secondly, it is also about being “bi-cultural”.Understanding the incentives in industry and academia respectively, is a basis for being able to find balances between e.g. rigor and relevance in the research. Time frames is another aspect that is different in the two cultures. Thirdly, the choice of communication channels is key to reach the intended audience.A wide range of channels exist, from face to face meetings, via tweets and blogs, to academic journal papers and theses; each having its own audience and purposes. The keynote speech will explore the challenges of industry-academia communication, based on two decades of collaboration experiences, both successes and failures. It aims to support primarily the academic side of the communication to help achieving industry impact through rigorous and relevant empirical software engineering research.

Bio: Dr.Per Runeson is a professor of software engineering at Lund University, Sweden, Head of the Department of Computer Science, and the Leader of its Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) and the Industrial Excellence Center on Embedded Applications Software Engineering (EASE). His research interests include empirical research on software development and management methods, in particular for software testing and open innovation, and cross disciplinary topics on the digital society. He has contributed significantly to software engineering research methodology by the books on case studies and experimentation in software engineering.He serves on the editorial boards of Empirical Software Engineering and Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, and is a member of several program committees.