2025 Program

Time in Eastern Time (US & Canada).

8:30 – 9:00	Coffee and assorted pastries
9:00 – 9:30	SEMLA 2025 Opening Session Opening by Prof. Foutse Khomh
9:30 – 10:30	Keynote
10:30 – 10:45	Coffee break
Session I	Agents (Systems & Evaluations)
10:45 – 11:15	Alexandre Lacoste (ServiceNow, CA) – Autonomous UI Agents: Open-Source Tools, Best Practices, and Safety
11:15 – 11:45	Royal Sequeira (Georgian, CA) – Voice AI Agents: technology, players, problems, and trends
11:45 – 12:15	Eric Wang (Simular, USA)
12:15 – 14:00	Lunch Break
Session II	Agents in Action – Empowering Software Workflows, Interfaces, and Data Systems
14:00 – 14:30	Daniel Jaroslawicz (Distyl AI, USA)
14:30 – 15:00	Ian Arawjo (Université de Montréal, CA) – Semantic Commit: Helping Users Update Intent Specifications for AI Memory at Scale
15:00 – 15:30	Till Döhmen (MotherDuck, NL) – Text-to-SQL within MotherDuck Dataware housing platform
15:30 – 16:00	Coffee Break

8:30 – 9:00	Coffee and assorted pastries
9:00 – 10:00	Keynote – Abhik Roychoudhury (National University of Singapore, SG) – AutoCodeRover: from research on automatic programming to spinoff acquisition
10:00 – 10:30	Coffee Break
Session III	LLMs for Coding & Data-Centric Tasks
10:30 – 11:00	Weiyi Shang (University of Waterloo, CA) – Evaluating the efficiency of LLM-generated code
11:00 – 11:30	Fabian Wenz (Celonis, DE) – An Annotation System for Rapid Text-to-SQL Benchmark Curation
11:30 – 12:00	Effy Li (CWI, NL) – Efficient Use of LLMs for Data Preparation
12:15 – 14:00	Lunch Break
Session IV	LLM-Integrated Use Cases
14:00 – 14:30	Damien Masson (Université de Montréal, CA) – Beyond Prompts: Designing Powerful Ways to Interact with AI
14:30 – 15:00	Orlando Marquez (ServiceNow, CA)
15:00 – 15:30	Olivier Nguyen (Twitch, USA) – Using LLMs for content moderation at Twitch
15:30 – 16:00	Coffee Break
Session V	Digital Twins and Sustainability
16:00 – 16:30	Jennifer McArthur (Toronto Metropolitan University, CA) – Cognitive Digital Twins for Decarbonization – Integrating AI with Building Technologies
16:30 – 17:00	Istvan David (McMaster University, CA) – Digital Twins for Engineering Complex and Sustainable Systems

8:30 – 9:00	Coffee and assorted pastries
Session VI	Talks & Tutorials
9:00 – 10:00	SEMTL
10:00 – 11:00	SEMTL
11:00 – 11:15	Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:30	SEMTL
12:30 – 14:00	Lunch break
14:00 – 16:00	Tutorials
16:00 – 16:30	Coffee Break
16:30 – 17:00	Closing