DEVOPSdigest

OutSystems announced that the Portuguese government has agreed to co-finance €5.1 million through the Portugal 2020 economic development program for a pair of innovative research and development programs led by OutSystems.

The DEV4ALL and GOLEM projects, done in partnership with Carnegie Mellon and several universities and research institutions, aim to accelerate disruptive innovation in the low-code development industry and make app development more accessible to non-technical people, also known as citizen developers.

The Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program (CMU Portugal) is a platform for education, research and innovation that brings together Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and several Portuguese universities, research institutions, and companies. Carnegie Mellon is a world-leading university in the field of Computer Science and is home to 13 laureates of Turing Awards, the Nobel prize of computing. The mission of CMU Portugal is to place Portugal at the forefront of research and technological development in the area of Information and Communication Technologies, by promoting an innovation ecosystem with a tight coupling between cutting-edge research, world-class graduate education, and highly innovative companies in the data-driven economy.

DEV4ALL (Development for All - Towards a Society of Software Developers) is a portfolio of initiatives aimed at making low-code development even easier. OutSystems will collaborate with the University of Minho, INESC TEC, and the NOVA LINCS lab hosted at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The collaboration will focus on unifying web and mobile development models, developing easy-to-use domain-specific languages, advancing collaborative development in low-code, creating intelligent apps without coding, enhancing AI-assisted development, and making low-code platforms easier to learn.

GOLEM (Automated Programming to Revolutionize App Development) is the most ambitious collaboration effort OutSystems has pursued with academic communities. The main goals of the three-year program are to automate programming and revolutionize the app development experience. The program aims to answer questions like:

- What is the next generation of low-code?
- What is the most natural way for a citizen developer to create fit-to-purpose apps without having to write code?
- How can such a visionary development experience be implemented?

GOLEM is one of a few select large-scale collaborative research projects to run under the CMU Portugal cooperation program. OutSystems will be working with Carnegie Mellon, the NOVA LINCS lab at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and INESC-ID.

“These two projects illustrate how OutSystems continues to look to the future and support initiatives that will disrupt the app development market,” said João Abril de Abreu, Innovation and University Relations Manager at OutSystems. “They reflect the work OutSystems has been doing building strong ties with strategically selected universities and research institutions to boost the company’s ability to do top-quality research.”