Prof. Dr. Xavier Franch

Xavier Franch is professor in the Service and Information System Engineering department (ESSI) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). He is the scientific leader of the Software Engineering for Information Systems Research Group (GESSI) at the UPC.

His main research lines are requirements engineering and the interplay among software engineering and artificial intelligence. He has published more than 250 research papers in international peer-reviewed journals, conferences and workshops.

In the area of Requirements Engineering, he is deeply involved in the two main conferences of the field: in IEEE RE, he received the Lifetime Service award (2023), the Most Influential Paper award (2022) for his work on the impact of NFRs in software architecture, and has been PC chair (2016) and General Chair (2008); in REFSQ, he received the Most Influential Paper award (2023) for his work on requirement patterns, and has been PC chair (2011) and Background Organization chair (2022-2025). He currently acts as: Editorial Board member of IST, JSS, Computing and Requirements Engineering Journal; Full Member and Council Vice-President of the International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB); member of the Academia Europea; member of the International Software Engineering Research Network (ISERN); Fellow of Artificial Intelligence Industry Academy within the International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA). In terms of EU-funded projects, he has been Project Coordinator of RISCOSS (FP7) and Q-Rapids (H2020); Scientific Manager of SUPERSEDE (H2020); UPC coordinator OpenReq (H2020) and HIVEMIND (HE).