KeynotesAIware 2025

Baptiste is an AI scientist at Mistral AI and the leader of the code generation team. Previously, he was a research scientist in Meta AI in Paris working in the code generation team. He works on large language models, with a special interest in applications to code. Baptiste contributed to Llama and started Code Llama.

Chao is a Principal Research Scientist at ByteDance (字节跳动). At ByteDance, he leads the Software Engineering Lab, where they conduct research on AI agents for software engineering. His research interest lies in the area of software testing, program repair and optimisations, and the synergy with machine learning and compiler techniques. He is also responsible for academic development and university collaboration.

Dickson Tsai is a product engineer at Anthropic, where he works on Claude Code, a terminal-native agentic AI coding assistant. He pioneered "hooks," a feature that allows developers to extend Claude Code's agent loop with custom scripts to provide automated feedback, manage permissions dynamically, and more. His other contributions include the SlashCommand tool for Claude to invoke custom commands, Opus Plan Mode to balance complex task planning and costs, and Claude 4 model integration. Previously, Dickson worked as a pre-training data research engineer at Anthropic and as a growth engineer on Google Search. He has presented on AI coding agents at various Fortune 500 companies.

Don Syme is a Principal Researcher at GitHub Next specialising in AI-driven collaborative programming systems. He is a co-creator of Copilot Workspace and the designer of the F# language. In 2015, he was honored with a Silver Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Jack Johns is a research scientist from BT's Software and AI Lab, investigating the future of software engineering and how the business should evolve in the next 5-10 years to stay ahead of the curve. He led the deployment of Amazon Q (formerly CodeWhisperer), the first generative AI tool within BT. Currently, there are ~1900 developers using the tool.

Dr. Jie M. Zhang is a lecturer of computer science at King’s College London. Her main research interests are the trustworthiness of software engineering, AI, and LLMs. She is a steering committee member of conferences IEEE ICST and ACM AIware. Over the last three years, she has been invited to give over 40 talks at conferences, universities, and IT companies. 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 and 2022 Transactions on Software Engineering Best Paper award, and the ICLR 2022 spotlight paper award. 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.

John Lam is working on building AI coding experiences at Microsoft. He is currently working on GitHub Copilot Agents at Github. He has been working in tech for a nearly 3 decades and at Microsoft since 2007 in a few different roles, mostly involving building developer tools and platforms. He is working at the intersection of AI, developers and productivity.

Lingming Zhang is an associate professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research lies at the intersection of Software Engineering and Machine Learning. His group has pioneered a series of work on LLM-based software testing, analysis, repair, and synthesis (such as TitanFuzz, KNighter, AlphaRepair, and Agentless), and also released multiple open code LLMs (including Magicoder, SWE-RL, PurpCode, and the recent Code World Model), with millions of downloads worldwide. Many of their techniques for training, improving, and applying code LLMs or agents have been widely adopted by leading AI companies, including Meta, Google, OpenAI, and DeepSeek.

Dr. Patanamon Thongtanunam (or Pick) is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to Associate Professor) at the School of Computing and Information Systems, the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include empirical software engineering, data mining, and data-driven techniques to support software engineering tasks. Her research work and endeavour has received numerous prestigious awards including an Australian Research Councile (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award (2021 - 2024), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellowship (2016 - 2018), ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award, IEEE Computer Society TCSE Distinguished Paper Award, as well as distinguished reviewer awards.

Taylor Mullen is the creator of Gemini CLI and an engineer at Google, building tools for future AI developers. Before Google, he was one of the founders of the modern GitHub Copilot IDE platforms, where he drove strategic vision and served as the tech lead for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio. He brings a deep background in developer tooling, OSS, and all things generative AI. A self-proclaimed serial side-projectist, Taylor is passionate about using AI to fundamentally improve the developer experience.

Dr. Yiling Lou is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on Software Engineering and its synergy with Artificial Intelligence. Her work has won multiple ACM SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Awards. She has severed as Program Co-chairs for LLM4Code (2024/2025/2026) and AIware (2025).