I presented our short paper, Designing for Dystopia: Software Engineering Research for the Post-apocalypse, at the Visions and Reflections Track in Foundations of Software Engineering conference at Seattle, Washington. The abstract of the paper follows:

Software engineering researchers have a tendency to be optimistic about the future. Though useful, optimism bias bolsters unrealistic expectations towards desirable outcomes. We argue that explicitly framing software engineering research through pessimistic futures, or dystopias, will mitigate optimism bias and engender more diverse and thought-provoking research directions. We demonstrate through three pop culture dystopias, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout 3, and Children of Men, how reflecting on dystopian scenarios provides research opportunities as well as implications, such as making research accessible to non-experts, that are relevant to our present.

Check it out before the world ends.