Armen SULEJMANI
Armen Sulejmani is a Research Engineer in the Software Engineering RDI Unit at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Université Paris-Saclay. His work focuses on low-code and model-driven platforms, as the lead developer of the open-source platform BESSER, and on smart dashboards for urban climate transition within the European Climaborough project. His background also includes research in machine learning, explainability, and formal methods.
Session
Researchers, educators, and developers face a common challenge when building robust, ethical, and sustainable AI software: the lack of accessible full-stack development resources and expertise. Low-code platforms promise to address this gap by automating parts of the coding process and reducing development time. But an important question remains: are these platforms truly open, or do they lock users into proprietary ecosystems?
Often, proprietary low-code tools create vendor lock-in and limit user freedom. We argue for more open-source alternatives that empower users to use, extend, and even adapt the tools to fit their specific needs.
In this workshop, we present BESSER, an open-source low-code platform for smart software development. Participants will get hands-on experience creating applications, databases, AI agents, and chatbots directly from our web modeling editor. Beyond these exercises, we will also explore the advantages of BESSER’s open-source ecosystem, which gives users the freedom to extend the platform, adapt it to their own domains, and contribute new features to the project, building and sharing their own model-driven solutions.