CS Colloquium Series @ UCY
Department of Computer Science - University of Cyprus
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus holds research colloquiums and social hours approximately once weekly. All university students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend. Notifications about new and upcoming events are automatically disseminated to a variety of institutional lists.
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Colloquium Coordinator: Demetris Zeinalipour
Colloquium: Open-source software, privacy laws, compliance: examining developers needs, Dr.-Ing. Georgia Kapitsaki (University of Cyprus, Cyprus), Monday, April 27, 2026, 15:00-16:00 EEST.
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus cordially invites you to the Colloquium entitled:
Open-source software, privacy laws, compliance: examining developers needs
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Speaker: Dr.-Ing. Georgia Kapitsaki |
Abstract:
Software engineers need to deal with various issues when working with and contributing to open-source software, while the software systems they create need to comply to data privacy regulations in the framework of general regulatory compliance. The talk will focus on the presentation of research works that are examining developers’ needs in the areas of open-source software, its licensing, and on data privacy compliance, considering popular laws such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The talk will most specifically present empirical works that explore how questions and answers from Stack Exchange sites (e.g. Software Engineering site) can be used to investigate the questions developers pose when dealing with licensing issues in open-source software, the main topics of questions, as well as concerns they have regarding open-source software in general. Furthermore, the talk will discuss how GitHub development artifacts, mainly repository commits and issues, can be used to understand the impact of data privacy laws in software development practices and repository adaptations in the open-source software community, and the main challenges developers discuss in this context. The analysis of repository commits relevant to popular data privacy laws will be presented, along with a categorization of concerns found in GitHub issues. Moreover, the talk will briefly present various tools that tackle some of the above areas to assist software engineering activities. The talk will be concluded with ongoing research and an outline of future research agenda.
Short Bio:
Georgia Kapitsaki is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus. She received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. Before joining UCY, she had worked as a software engineer in Ericsson Group (Germany) as a research associate at NTUA (Greece), and as a laboratory assistant at the Technical Institute of Piraeus (Greece). As faculty at UCY, she coordinated and has been the principal investigator of national and EU funded research projects (e.g. Support4Resilience, SocioCoast, CYberSafetyV). She has been involved in the organization of international conferences (e.g. SANER 2026, ISD 2025, ICSME 2022) and has been serving as member of the program committee of international conferences (e.g. FSE 2026, MSR 2026, SAC 2026, ESEM 2025, ICWS 2025, SANER 2024). She is a member of the editorial board of Springer Software Quality journal, ERCIM News, and Applied Computing and Intelligence. She has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and scientific conferences and workshops. She is on the board of directors of GFOSS Open Technologies Alliance. Her research interests include Software Engineering, Software Reuse, and Privacy Enhancing Technologies.
Note:
This colloquium is part of the speaker's procedure for evaluation and promotion from Associate Professor to Full Professor.
