As treatment plans involve more medications, anticipating and preventing drug-drug interactions (DDIs) becomes increasingly important. Such interactions can result in harmful side effects and may reduce therapy effectiveness. Currently, most computational approaches for DDI prediction rely heavily on complex feature engineering and require chemical information to be structured in specific formats to enable accurate detection of potential interactions. This study presents the first investigation of the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) for DDI prediction using drug characteristics expressed solely in free-text form. Specifically, we use SMILES notations, target organisms, and gene associations as inputs in purpose-designed prompts, allowing LLMs to learn the underlying relationships among these descriptors and accordingly predict possible DDIs. We evaluated the performance of 18 distinct LLMs under zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings on the DrugBank dataset (version 5.1.12) to identify the most effective paradigm. We then assessed the generalizability of the fine-tuned models on 13 external DDI datasets against well-known machine learning baselines. The results demonstrated that, while zero-shot and few-shot paradigms showed only modest utility, fine-tuned models achieved superior sensitivity while maintaining competitive accuracy and F1-score compared to baselines. Notably, despite its small size, the Phi-3.5 2.7B model attained a sensitivity of 0.978 and an accuracy of 0.919. These findings suggest that computational efficiency and task-specific adaptation are more important than model size in order to capture the complex patterns inherent in drug interactions, and outline a more accessible paradigm for DDI prediction that can be integrated into clinical decision support systems.

As blockchain technology continues to evolve, the need for accessible solutions for developing smart contracts has grown, especially for non-technical users. This paper addresses practitioners' challenges in generating Solidity smart contracts from natural language requirements within the AstraKode Blockchain no-code platform (AKB). Our goal is to lower the barrier of entry into smart contract development, making it more accessible to users with limited technical expertise. We propose three methods, i.e., Naive Generation, Augmented Generation, and Enhanced Generation, each utilizing large language models to streamline the code generation process. These methods cater to different user needs, from rapid prototyping to handling complex business scenarios, improving accessibility and usability within AKB. We demonstrate their practical relevance, potential, and limitations in addressing real-world challenges in smart contract development through empirical evaluations and practitioner feedback. Thanks to collaboration with academia and effective knowledge transfer, these methods provide innovative solutions to the challenges of smart contract generation. Furthermore, they have been integrated into AKB to enhance user services, ultimately promoting the development and deployment of secure and efficient smart contracts in the industry.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized various sectors by enabling devices to communicate and interact seamlessly. However, developing IoT applications has data management, security, and interoperability challenges. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in addressing these challenges due to their advanced language processing capabilities. This Systematic Literature Review assesses the role of LLMs in addressing IoT challenges, exploring the strategies, hardware, and software configurations used, and identifying directions for future research. We extensively searched databases like Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library, initially screening 1419 studies and identifying an additional 1167 through snowballing, ultimately focusing on 55 relevant papers. The findings reveal LLMs’ potential to address key IoT challenges such as security and scalability. However, they also highlight significant obstacles, including high computational demands and the complexities of training and tuning these models. Future research should aim to develop methods to reduce the computational requirements of LLMs, improve training datasets, simplify implementation processes, and explore the ethical and privacy implications of using LLMs in IoT applications.

Medication errors significantly threaten patient safety, leading to adverse drug events and substantial economic burdens on healthcare systems. Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) aimed at mitigating these errors often face limitations when processing unstructured clinical data, including reliance on static databases and rule-based algorithms, frequently generating excessive alerts that lead to alert fatigue among healthcare providers. This paper introduces HELIOT, an innovative CDSS for adverse drug reaction management that processes free-text clinical information using Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with a comprehensive pharmaceutical data repository. HELIOT leverages advanced natural language processing capabilities to interpret medical narratives, extract relevant drug reaction information from unstructured clinical notes, and learn from past patient-specific medication tolerances to reduce false alerts, enabling more nuanced and contextual adverse drug event warnings across primary care, specialist consultations, and hospital settings. Evaluation using three state-of-the-art LLMs on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates classification accuracy ranging from 98.77% to 99.80% with zero false negatives for life-threatening reactions. This high accuracy enabled HELIOT to achieve a 50-53% reduction in interruptive alerts compared to traditional CDSSs while maintaining perfect safety profiles. To support clinical deployment, the system incorporates a confidence-based risk stratification framework that enables automated decisions for high-certainty cases while ensuring appropriate clinical oversight for uncertain classifications. Clinical usability evaluation with healthcare professionals validated these achievements, revealing strong acceptance and unanimous preference for HELIOT’s contextual approach over traditional systems. These findings show promise; however, broader clinical trials remain essential to confirm effectiveness across diverse healthcare environments.

COmmon Software Measurement International Consortium (COSMIC) Functional Size Measurement is a method widely used in the software industry to quantify user functionality and measure software size, which is crucial for estimating development effort, cost, and resource allocation. COSMIC measurement is a manual task that requires qualified professionals and effort. To support professionals in COSMIC measurement, we propose an automatic approach, CosMet, that leverages Large Language Models to measure software size starting from use cases specified in natural language. To evaluate the proposed approach, we developed a web tool that implements CosMet using GPT-4 and conducted two studies to assess the approach quantitatively and qualitatively. Initially, we experimented with CosMet on seven software systems, encompassing 123 use cases, and compared the generated results with the ground truth created by two certified professionals. Then, seven professional measurers evaluated the analysis achieved by CosMet and the extent to which the approach reduces the measurement time. The first study's results revealed that CosMet is highly effective in analyzing and measuring use cases. The second study highlighted that CosMet offers a transparent and interpretable analysis, allowing practitioners to understand how the measurement is derived and make necessary adjustments. Additionally, it reduces the manual measurement time by 60-80%.

In the fast-paced world of healthcare technology, combining IoT devices with large language models (LLMs) offers a promising path to transform Clinical Decision-Support Systems (CDSS). This Ph.D. project is designed to tap into IoT’s extensive data collection ability and LLMs’ superior natural language processing skills. It aims to improve clinical decision-making and patient care through a sophisticated DSS that utilizes both technologies’ strengths. The project delves into the software engineering challenges and methodologies required to build an effective DSS. It investigates how to smoothly evaluate and integrate IoT and LLMs into healthcare environments, tackling significant issues like data complexity, privacy concerns, and the necessity for high accuracy in medical settings. It underscores the critical role of thorough evaluation and assessment in developing healthcare technologies.

This paper introduces AGORA, an innovative approach that leverages Large Language Models to automate the definition of acceptance test cases from use cases. AGORA consists of two phases that exploit prompt engineering to 1) identify test cases for specific use cases and 2) generate detailed acceptance tests cases. AGORA was evaluated through a controlled experiment involving industry professionals, comparing the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach with the manual method. The results showed that AGORA can generate acceptance test cases with a quality comparable to that obtained manually but improving the process efficiency by over 90% in a fraction of the time. Furthermore, user feedback indicated high satisfaction with using the proposed approach. These findings underscore the potential of AGORA as a tool to enhance the efficiency and quality of the software testing process.

The software industry’s complexity and scale have increased rapidly, leading to challenges in managing information and tasks among developer teams, often resulting in inefficiencies, misunderstandings, and delays. The extensive search for automated tasks led to using chatbots—conversational agents—in software development. However, despite their positive contributions, their adoption has numerous issues, notably the lack of full working context, making their support sometimes useless. To address such a limitation, we propose C4SE, a chatbot designed to assist software engineers and managers in performing various tasks by gathering information helpful for better support. We use the GPT 3.5 model, and a specialized data store based on a vector database for long-term memory, to understand users’ intentions and maintain contextual information. Our prototype C4SE can perform code suggestions, reviews, GitHub API operations, and generate unit and acceptance test cases. Preliminary evaluation reports encouraging results, showing potential to increase productivity in the software development lifecycle.

UML use cases are commonly used in software engineering to specify the functional requirements of a system since they are an effective tool for interacting with stakeholders thanks to the use of natural languages. However, producing high-quality use cases can be challenging due to the lack of precise guidelines and suitable tools. This can lead to problems, e.g. inaccuracy and incompleteness, in the derived software artifacts and the final product. Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide the premises for developing tools supporting activities based on natural languages. In this paper, we propose ECHO, a novel approach for supporting software engineers in enhancing the quality of UML use cases using LLMs. Our approach consists of a co-prompt engineering approach and an iterative and interactive process with the LLM to improve the quality of use cases, based on practitioners’ feedback. To prove the feasibility of the proposal, we instantiated the approach using ChatGPT and performed a controlled experiment to assess its effectiveness by involving seven software engineering professionals. Three were part of the experimental group and used ECHO to improve the quality of the use cases. Three others were the control group and enhanced the quality of use cases manually. Finally, the last participant acted as an oracle, blind w.r.t. the groups, and evaluated the quality of the enhanced use cases, both qualitatively by means of a questionnaire, and quantitatively, by means of the Use Case Points metric. Results show that ECHO can effectively support software engineers to improve use cases’ quality thanks to the prompts suitably designed to interact with ChatGPT.