Speakers, Bios & Abstracts

Abstract

This talk addresses the question: "How can we use Large Language Models for reliable Software Engineering when the models are inherently non-deterministic and worse, may hallucinate, thereby leading to more, not fewer bugs?

We outline the approach known as "Assured Large Language Model Software Engineering" (Assured LLMSE), which addresses the twin challenges of:

1. Ensuring LLM-generated code does not regress the properties of the original code.

2. Quantifying the improvements achieved in a verifiable and measurable way.

In so doing, the Assured LLMSE approach tackles the problem of LLMs' tendency to hallucinate, as well as providing confidence that generated code improves on the existing code base. Using Assured LLMSE, not only avoids problems of non-determinism and hallucination, but can even generate code that is superior-by-design to human-authored code, in well-defined ways. The keynote will outline the overall approach to Assured LLMSE, and will present results from its application at Meta platforms in the development of large systems of tens to hundreds of millions of lines of code.

This is joint work with Nadia Alshahwan, Andrea Aquino, Jubin Chheda, Anastasia Finegenova, Inna Harper, Mitya Lyubarskiy, Neil Maiden, Alexander Mols, Shubho Sengupta, Alexandru Marginean, and Eddy Wang.

Mark Harman is a full-time Research Scientist at Meta Platforms in the Instagram Product Performance team, working on software engineering automation. He was previously in the Simulation-Based Testing (SBT) team at Meta, which he co-founded. The SBT team developed and deployed both the Sapienz and WW platforms for client- and server- side testing. Sapienz grew out of Majicke (a start up Mark co-founded) that was acquired by Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2017. Prior to working at Meta Platforms, Mark was head of Software Engineering at UCL and director of its CREST centre, where he remains a part time professor. In his more purely scientific work, he co-founded the field Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) in 2001. He received the IEEE Harlan Mills Award and the ACM Outstanding Research Award in 2019 for his work on Software Engineering automation, and was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2020.

Abstract

Information will follow soon.

Dorothea Wagner is a German computer scientist, known for her research in graph drawing, route planning, and social network analysis. She heads the Institute of Theoretical Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Wagner did her undergraduate studies at RWTH Aachen University, graduating in 1983, and then continued at RWTH Aachen for her graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1986 under the supervision of Rolf Möhring and Walter Oberschelp. She then earned her habilitation at the Berlin Institute of Technology in 1992. She stayed at the Berlin Institute of Technology as an assistant professor, also taking a temporary position at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1993, before becoming a full professor at the University of Konstanz in 1994. In 2003, she moved to Karlsruhe.

From 2007 to 2014 she was vice president of the German Research Foundation (DFG), 2015 to 2023 member of the German Council for Science and Humanities and 2020 to 2023 chair of the council. She is editor-in-chief of the OpenAccess Series in Informatics book series published by Schloss Dagstuhl and has been on the editorial boards and program committees of many more computer science journals and conferences. She coordinated several national and international research programs. In 2019 she received the Konrad Zuse medal for her achievements in computer science. She is a member of Academia Europaea, acatech - National Academy of Science and Engineering Germany and Heidelberg Academy of Science, and holds a honorary doctorate degree from TU Dortmund.

Short Bio

Carlo Ghezzi is an ACM Fellow (1999), an IEEE Fellow (2005), a member of the European Academy of Sciences and of the Italian Academy of Sciences. He received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2015) and the Distinguished Service Award (2006). He has been President of Informatics Europe. He has been a member of the program committee of flagship conferences in the software engineering field, such as the ICSE and ESEC/FSE, for which he also served as Program and General Chair. He has been the Editor in Chief of the ACM Trans. on Software Engineering and Methodology and an associate editor of and IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, Communications of the ACM and Science of Computer Programming, and Computing. Ghezzi’s research has been mostly focusing on different aspects of software engineering. He co-authored over 200 papers and 8 books. He coordinated several national and international research projects. He has been the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant.

Short Bio

Lynda Hardman is Manager Research & Strategy at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI, https://www.cwi.nl), the Dutch national research centre for Mathematics and Computer Science. She is full professor, part-time, of Multimedia Discourse Interaction at Utrecht University. Her research interests are in how visualisations can be used to improve the way domain experts interpret and interact with (linked) data.
Prof. Hardman is the director of Amsterdam Data Science (http://amsterdamdatascience.nl), a partner organization whose mission is to strengthen the Data Science and AI ecosystem that spans academia, industry and society in the Amsterdam region. She is the European director of LIAMA (http://liama.ia.ac.cn), a research collaboration since 1997 between INRIA (France), CWI and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
She was the president of Informatics Europe 2016-2017. During her time as board member, she co-founded the IE working group Women in Informatics Research and Education around 2012.
She was named ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014 and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Short Bio

Enrico Nardelli is a full professor of Informatics in the University of Roma "Tor Vergata", affiliated with the Department of Mathematics. Since April 2014 he is coordinating the project “Programma il Futuro“ for the introduction of basic concepts of informatics as a scientific subject in Italian schools, with emphasis on primary schools and on computational thinking. Programma il Futuro is a joint project bewteen the Italian Ministry of Education and CINI, the Italian national inter-university Consortium for Informatics. Since its inception, the project has led about three million Italian students (half of them in primary schools) to start learning the principle of informatics. He was the President of Informatics Europe from 2018-2023, the association of informatics departments and research laboratories in Europe and neighbouring areas and initiator of the Informatics for All Coalition.