The talk “smtgcc: Using an SMT solver to find bugs in GCC” will be presented by Krister Walfridsson on December the 4th, at 16:00, online:

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Abstract:

“SMT solvers are increasingly effective for finding compiler bugs and validating optimizations. This talk presents smtgcc, a translation-validation tool for GCC. It is similar to Alive2 for LLVM, but smtgcc’s approach diverges from Alive2 because GCC and LLVM follow different design choices. I will explain how smtgcc works and discuss issues in formalizing the semantics of GIMPLE, GCC’s IR.”

About the Speaker:

Krister Walfridsson became involved with the GCC project while studying at university in the mid-1990s. Since completing his studies, he has worked with both compilers and operating systems in various embedded environments. Most recently, he spent 10 years at Arm as a principal compiler engineer in the Mali GPU team. He is currently taking a few years off to work on personal projects and to dance.

The talk entitled “Knowledge Graphs + AI: The Evolution of Automated GitHub Issue Resolution“, will be presented by Prof. He Ye on November 17th, at 14:30, in room B008, moderated by Prof. Alexandra Mendes (DEI).

Abstract:

“AI coding agents are becoming increasingly capable, achieving strong results on benchmarks such as SWE-bench. However, most still struggle with real-world challenges such as issue reproduction, precise context retrieval from large codebases, and the high cost of LLMs. In this talk, I will introduce our recent code agent, Prometheus — a knowledge graph-powered, multi-agent system designed to tackle GitHub issues in practice. Prometheus transforms entire repositories into a unified knowledge graph stored in Neo4j for scalable and structured reasoning. This enables precise, cross-language context retrieval, allowing large language models to generate accurate and efficient fixes. Prometheus delivers robust performance, resolving diverse issues across seven programming languages. I will show how combining LLMs with knowledge graphs can advance automated issue resolution beyond today’s benchmark-driven limits. We have recently transitioned this research into an off-the-shelf product that helps industry resolve software issues automatically.”

About the Speaker:

He Ye is an Assistant Professor at University College London. She previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and received her PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her research centers on developing the next generation of code agents to automate software engineering tasks, with a focus on codebase context retrieval, automated issue resolution, and code agent memory construction. Beyond academia, she is the co-founder of EuniAI, a startup committed to turning research into real-world solutions that help developers address practical software challenges.

The talk entitled “Energy-awareness in compute acceleration: The role of FPGAs“, will be presented by Prof. Shreejith Shanker on October 30, at 11:30, in room B012, and will be moderated by Prof. Tiago Carvalho (DEI).

Abstract:

“The talk will cover a set of projects that my team at TCD is working on, spanning embedded and distributed systems to high-performance media workflows, and how FPGAs are enabling an energy-performance trade-off in these applications.”

About the Speaker:

Dr. Shreejith Shanker is an Assistant Professor of Reconfigurable Computing at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and leads the research group on reconfigurable architectures, accelerators and workflows. His research interests include reconfigurable and adaptive computing architectures, in-network computing, post-production media workflows, design automation tools and distributed embedded systems, with a focus on performance-energy trade-off and hardware-software codesign approaches.

The talk “Declarative Programming” will be delivered by Steven Pemberton, a renowned researcher in Computer Science and Information Technology and an ACM Distinguished Speaker, on October 23rd at 10:00, in room B033, and will be moderated by Prof. João Ferreira (DEI). Admission is free.

Abstract:

“In the 50s, when the first programming languages were designed, computers cost millions, and relatively, programmers were almost free. Those programming languages therefore reflected that relationship: it didn’t matter if it took a long time to program, as long as the resulting program ran as fast as possible.
Now, that relationship has been reversed, which I call Moore’s Switch: compare to the cost of programmers, computers are almost free.
And yet we are still programming in descendants of the programming languages from the 50s: we are still telling the computers step by step how to solve the program.
Declarative programming is a new approach to applications: rather than describing exactly how to reach the solution, it describe what the solution should look like, and leaves more of the administrative parts of the program to the computer.
One of the few declarative languages available is XForms, an XML-based language that despite what its name might suggest is not only about form. Large projects, at large companies such as the National Health Service, the BBC and Xerox, have shown that by using XFoms, programming time and cost of application can be reduced to a tenth and sometimes even much more.”

About the Speaker:

“Steven Pemberton is a distinguished researcher in the field of computer science and information technology, with a long and rich history of contributions to the development of the internet and the web. He is affiliated with the Dutch national research centre Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he conducts research on interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies.
At university he was tutored by Dick Grimsdale who built the world’s first transistorised computer, and who was himself a tutee of Alan Turing. After university, Pemberton — coincidentally — worked in Turing’s old department in Manchester, writing software for the 5th computer in the line of computers Turing had worked on.
Pemberton was the first user of the open internet in Europe when the CWI created the first connection in 1988, and has been involved with the web from its inception, co-designing several web standards, including HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, and RDFa. He chairs two groups at W3C.
In addition to his work on the web, Pemberton has also made significant contributions to other areas of computer science, such as the design of programming languages, having co-designed the language that Python is based on, and the study of human-computer interaction. His involvement with ACM includes being editor in chief of The SIGCHI Bulletin, and then ACM interactions for a decade; he has chaired the CHI Conference and he co-founded the Netherlands local SIGCHI group, and chaired several local CHI conferences there.
He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award and the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award.
As a speaker, Pemberton is known for his engaging and informative presentations, which draw on his deep knowledge of computer science and his passion for technology, and cover both social and technological aspects of computing. His talks are always thought-provoking and entertaining, and he has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and events around the world. In 2023 he became an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He is bi-lingual in English and Dutch.
A fuller bio, videos, and a full list of talks is available on his website: https://www.cwi.nl/~steven”

The talk “Software process modeling and test automation: Introducing the Reliable Software Architectures Research Group” will be presented October the 9th, at 15:30, room B031, and will be moderated by Prof. Ana Paiva (DEI).

Abstract:

“In this talk, I will give an overview of research done by the Reliable Software Architectures Research Group at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czechia. The focus will be on analysing software process data to detect project management (anti-)patterns, where we’ll discuss the challenges in modeling software process elements in a way that is conducive to mapping onto the information gathered in project management tools. We’ll also touch the topic of analyzing software implementations to perform advanced verification and testing.”

About the Speaker:

Přemek Brada is an Associate Professor in Software Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czechia.  His research has covered the areas of software architecture consistency, interactive methods of architecture visualization, and software development methodologies including analysis of related process data.  He teaches bachelor and master level courses on object-oriented design and modeling, advanced software engineering practices, and also knowledge management. Currently he serves as the head of department, and is a member of the Board of Informatics Europe, the association of European informatics faculties and departments.

The talk ‘Networks, networks, and more networks: applications in humanities, data science, and machine learning’ will be presented on October 1st, at 14:45, in room B004, moderated by Prof. Rosaldo Rossetti (DEI).

Abstract:

“It is known that networks or graphs can be used in machine learning and data science to represent and analyze data that has complex relationships. Besides these uses, networks are also relevant to the overall AI agenda in at least two aspects. First, it relates to automated data gathering and language models in the semantic web, since the actual data have to be acquired in some manner in order to form the graphs. Second, it can be used to accelerate learning tasks, as in the case of reinforcement learning. In this talk I present examples of how data is acquired and used in applications in the Humanities (history, storytelling) in order to discover patterns and/or to investigate assumptions. Then, I discuss applications on data science and machine learning, as for instance the use of networks in reinforcement learning, with examples from urban mobility and car to infrastructure communication.”

About the Speaker:

Ana Bazzan is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the Institute of Informatics, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her research focuses on multiagent systems, in particular on agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS), and multiagent learning for the transportation domain. Since 1996, she has collaborated with various researchers in the application of ABMS and game theory to social science domains, such as the emergence of cooperation, the prisoner’s dilemma and public goods games. In recent years, she has contributed to different topics regarding smart cities, focusing on transportation, as well as on the synergies between multiagent systems, machine learning, and complex systems. In 2014, Bazzan was General Co-chair of AAMAS (the premier conference in the area of autonomous agents and multiagent systems).