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Symposium and Summit 2024

The event took place on February 1st, 2024, at the UNESCO headquarters. 

Explore this page to discover presentations and photographs from the Software Heritage Symposium and Summit 2024.

Discover the playlist including all the event’s sessions below:

Software Heritage annual community event

Software is all around us: it powers our industry, fuels innovation, supports scientific research and lies at the heart of our societies. 

Software Heritage, the universal source code archive, was launched in 2016 by Inria (France). Software Heritage’s ambitious goal is to collect, preserve and share all software source code, building an essential infrastructure at the service of cultural heritage, digital development, science, industry, and society as a whole. 

On April 3rd, 2017, a landmark partnership agreement was signed between UNESCO and Inria to establish a framework for collaboration on preserving the knowledge embedded in software source code, and making it widely available, centred around the ongoing development of the Software Heritage archive within the framework of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme.

In 2021, we celebrated the 5th anniversary of Software Heritage with the first annual Symposium. A second Symposium took place in 2023. This is Software Heritage’s 3rd Symposium event.

As part of the event, we gathered together to take stock of the achievements and status of Software Heritage, and to highlight the relevance of its mission in the context of today’s dynamic digital innovation landscape, including rapid changes in the field of generative artificial intelligence.

Programme

The half-day event, which followed a hybrid format of virtual and on-site participation at the UNESCO Headquarters, focused on several major dimensions of relevance to the Software Heritage Archive.

  • Software source code as documentary heritage and an enabler for historical research
  • Scientific challenges for analyzing and learning from preserved Source Code
  • Software source code as a first-class research output in the Open Science ecosystem
  • Software source code as an enabler for innovation and sharing in industry and administration

Below you can find the programme.

14:00 Welcome address and opening

  • Marielza Oliveira, Director Communications and Information – Division for Digital Inclusion, Policies and Transformation, UNESCO

  • Gilles Mathieu – representative, French Ministry of Research and Higher Education  

  • Jean-Frédéric Gerbeau, Inria Deputy CEO for Science
  • Roberto Di Cosmo, Director, Software Heritage  
14:45 Industry & Public administration panel
  • Guillaume Avrin, National coordinator for artificial intelligence, Direction Générale des Entreprises
  • Omar Mohsine, Office of the United Nations Special Envoy on Technology
  • Marc Palazon, Board member and President of the Open Source commission, Numeum
  • Kate Stewart, VP Dependable Embedded Systems, Linux Foundation

Moderator: Roberto Di Cosmo, Director, Software Heritage

15:30 Scientific challenges for analyzing and learning from preserved Source Code
  • Sebastiano Vigna, Full professor, Università degli Studi di Milano
  • Harm de Vries, Staff research scientist, ServiceNow and Leandro von Werra, Hugging Face  
15:50 Coffee Break



16:15 Open Science Panel
  • Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, Professor, University of Campinas – UNICAMP
  • Christopher S. Marcum,  Senior Statistician and Senior Science Policy Analyst, Office of the Chief Statistician of the United States
  • Vanessa Proudman, Director, SPARC Europe
  • Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure

Moderator: Bhanu Neupane, Programme Manager for ICT and Sciences and Open Access to Scientific Research, UNESCO

17:00 Panel on Software Source code as part of Memory of the World
  • Rosana Lanzelotte, President, Musica Brasilis  
  • Pio Pellizzari,  Delegate of IASA, International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives
  • Valérie Schafer, Professor, C2DH – University of Luxembourg  
  • Prateek Sibal, Programme Specialist, UNESCO

Moderator: Fackson Banda, Chief, Documentary Heritage Unit, UNESCO

17:45 Closing of the event

All pictures © Inria / Photo M. Magnin

Last year retrospective

Dive into the Software Heritage Symposium and Summit 2023 presentations, videos, and photos to uncover the essence of software preservation and innovation.