2025 Program 

Time in Eastern Time (US & Canada).

June 17, 2025

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

June 18, 2025

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

June 19, 2025

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