Ireland is one of three countries on the programme that will research how the principles of ecology can be adopted to design more stable software systems. Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, provides the Irish team which is being led by Prof Siobhan Clarke of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin. Lero brings together researchers in the University of Limerick, TCD, University College Dublin, Dublin City University, NUI Galway and Dundalk Institute of Technology and is funded by Science Foundation Ireland and other Irish and international funding agencies. “This is a novel and exciting programme which, for the first time, will use the principles of ecological and evolutionary systems and apply them to software development. Biodiversity is essential for the robustness and adaptability of ecological and many other systems. The limited amount of diversity in software is a major concern that we aim to address under this programme,” said Prof Clarke. TCD's Dr Hui Song, who will work on the three-year programme, added, “One of our international partners is the University of Rennes in France, which is a leader in ecological research. So this will be a truly multi-disciplinary collaboration.” The programme is called 'DIVERSIFY: Ecology-inspired software diversity for distributed adaptation in CAS (Collaborative Adaptive Systems)', as it will explore diversity as the foundation for novel software design. It brings together leading European researchers from software-intensive distributed systems and ecology in Ireland, France and Norway in order to translate ecological concepts and processes into software design. Dr Mike Hinchey, director of Lero, said its research centred on designing software that can adapt in a stable manner over time, known as Evolving Critical Systems. "We anticipate that the unique DIVERSIFY programme will provide a breakthrough into automated technologies to maintain and evaluate stable systems at runtime,” he concluded.