Digital Sovereignty and Software Engineering for the IoT-laden, AI/ML-driven Era

Today's software engineering already needs to deal with challenges originating from the multidisciplinarity that is required to realize IoT products: Many variants consist of sensor/actuator-powered systems that already today use AI/ML systems to better cope with the unstructuredness of their intended operational design domain (ODD), while, at the same time, such systems need to be monitored, diagnosed, maintained, and evolved using cloud-powered dashboards and data analytics pipelines that process, aggregate, and analyze countless data points preferably in real-time. This position paper discusses selected aspects related to Digital Sovereignty from a software engineering's perspective for the IoT-laden, AI/ML-driven era: While we can undeniably expect more and more benefits from such solutions, a specific light shall be shed in particular on challenges and responsibilities at design- and operation-time that, at minimum, prepare for and enable or, even better, preserve and extend digital sovereignty from a software engineering's perspective.