Keynote Speaker

Leonardo Mariani

University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Getting the Right System vs Getting the System Right: My Experience With Project-Scale Gen AI

Software development is being reshaped by agentic systems, which aim to accelerate application development through LLM-based agents capable of assisting developers throughout the development process. While their effectiveness in small, localized generation tasks is well established, automated code generation at full project scale remains a challenging scenario. This talk presents results and insights from a set of experiments on repository-scale code generation with agentic systems, highlighting both what these systems currently excel at and where they struggle. Particular attention is given to the distinction between obtaining the right system and obtaining any working system, illustrating how agentic approaches behave with respect to these two objectives.

Short Bio

Leonardo Mariani is a Full Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He holds a PhD in Computer Science, received from the same university. His research interests include software engineering, in particular software testing, program analysis, automated debugging, AI4SE, and self-adaptive systems. He has authored more than 200 papers appeared at top software engineering conferences and journals. He received the ICST MIP award for his ICST 2013 paper. He was awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant in 2015, an ERC Proof of Concept grant in 2018. He is regularly involved in the organization of major software engineering conferences.

Keynote Speaker

Jie Zhang

Mistral AI and King's College London

The Yin and Yang of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence: A Symbiotic Evolution

The relationship between Software Engineering (SE) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown into a powerful two-way partnership, much like the balance of Yin and Yang. On one hand, AI relies entirely on software engineering, its solid system design, computing infrastructure, and careful data management. On the other hand, software engineering is being completely transformed by AI, with smart models and reasoning frameworks taking over everything from repetitive coding tasks to complex bug fixes and system design.

This talk explores how SE and AI constantly push and pull against each other, acting as both enablers and limits for one another, and looks ahead at the next decade. I will talk about both AI for SE and SE for AI, and introduce my visions on how these two fields are merging into a self-improving loop, where AI improves itself with rigorous software engineering controls.

Short Bio

Dr. Jie M. Zhang is an AI scientist at Mistral AI (full time) and a senior lecturer of computer science at King's College London (part-time), working on AI and software engineering. She is the PC co-chair of ASE 2027 and ISSRE 2026, the general chair of AIware 2025, and the area chair of NeurIPS 2026, ICSE 2026, ASE 2026, and ASE 2025. In recognition of her influence, she was named one of the Top 15 Global Chinese Female Young Scholars in Interdisciplinary AI (2023). Her research has won the FSE 2025 distinguished paper award, the 2024 Transactions on Software Engineering Best Paper award, the 2022 Transactions on Software Engineering Best Paper award, and the ICLR 2022 spotlight paper. She is also the winner of 2025 ACM SIGSOFT Early Research Award, one of the most prestigious honours for early-career researchers in the software engineering community.