Machine learning (ML) is essential in modern technology, driving complex data-driven decisions. By 2025, daily data generation will exceed 463 exabytes, increasing ML’s influence and ethical risks of data exploitation and discrimination. The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act highlights the need for ethical AI solutions.

The term metaverse refers to a persistent, virtual, three-dimensional environment where individuals may communicate, engage, and collaborate. One of the most multifaceted and challenging use cases of the metaverse is education, where educators and learners may require multiple technical, social, psychological, and interaction instruments to accomplish their learning objectives. While the characteristics of the metaverse might nicely fit the problem’s needs, our research points out a noticeable lack of knowledge into (1) the specific requirements that an educational metaverse should actually fulfill to let educators and learners successfully interact towards their objectives and (2) how to design an appropriate educational metaverse for both educators and learners. In this paper, we aim to bridge this knowledge gap by proposing SENEM, a novel software engineering-enabled educational metaverse. We first elicit a set of functional requirements that an educational metaverse should fulfill. In this respect, we conduct a literature survey to extract the currently available knowledge on the matter discussed by the research community, and afterward, we assess and complement such knowledge through semi-structured interviews with educators and learners. Upon completing the requirements elicitation stage, we then build our prototype implementation of SENEM, a metaverse that makes available to educators and learners the features identified in the previous stage. Finally, we evaluate the tool in terms of learnability, efficiency, and satisfaction through a Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation research approach, leading us to the iterative refinement of our prototype. Through our survey strategy, we extracted nine requirements that guided the tool development that the study participants positively evaluated. Our study reveals that the target audience appreciates the elicited design strategy. Our work has the potential to form a solid contribution that other researchers can use as a basis for further improvements.

In the era of social distancing, distance learning represents a crucial educational challenge. Several 2D information technologies have been provided, yet these share multiple limitations and have negative social, educational, and psychological implications for learners. Metaverse promises to revolutionize education as we know it: this is a persistent, virtual, three-dimensional environment that is supposed to address most of the limitations of 2D information technologies. Nonetheless, there are still software engineering challenges to face to enable such a metaverse, especially when turning to software security and privacy. In this paper, we aim at performing the first steps toward an improved understanding of the security perspective of educational metaverse, by analyzing how blockchain can be employed within educational environments and how applications may be designed. Our ultimate goal is to provide insights into how blockchain can be further tailored in the context of educational metaverse. We conduct a systematic literature review, which targets 20 primary studies. The key findings of the study showcase the use of blockchain in 3 educational tasks, other than describing the blockchain design approaches, which protocol they commonly use and the associated limitations. We conclude by developing a conceptualization of a blockchain-based educational metaverse.

Modern software systems are increasingly complex and the risk of falling into security concerns is high if these systems are not developed with a proper security mindset. Despite the empirical studies and security-oriented approaches proposed by researchers and tool vendors, we still point out a lack of knowledge on the security testing processes applied by companies to reduce risks connected to software security. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap of knowledge by performing an interview-based study with 19 security experts to understand how companies arrange security testing and how the process of security testing is actually performed in practice. Our results highlight that some companies incorporated the figure of the security tester in the software life cycle, yet practitioners reported a lack of standardized guidelines for security testing. From a management perspective, our results suggest that the introduction of formal communication between development and security testing teams may lead to better performance.