| Time: | December 3, 2025, 9:45 a.m. (CET) |
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| Universitätstraße 32 Room 101, Campus Vaihingen of the University of Stuttgart | |
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We are pleased to announce our upcoming ELLIS Unit Stuttgart Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Mira Mezini (TU Darmstadt)! Looking forward to seeing you all there! No registration necessary.
The talk will be followed by an informal reception during which finger food and drinks will be provided.
Title: AI-assisted Programming: From Intelligent Code Completion to Foundation Models. A Twenty-Year Journey
Abstract: From pioneering work on intelligent code completion to large language models, AI has have significant impact on software engineering over the past two decades. This talk traces the evolution of AI-assisted programming, highlighting advancements and outlining future directions. The talk is structured in three parts. First, we’ll journey back to 2000-2010, exploring pioneering applications of machine learning methods to coding tasks, in particular, the groundbreaking work from my lab on intelligent code completion, which was honored with the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award in 2024, showcasing the software engineering community’s early contributions. The second part examines the current landscape dominated by modern large language models (LLMs) in coding. Primarily driven by the ML community, these tools are being rapidly adapted by the software engineering community for various tasks. This part of the talk will highlight the pressing need for designing more reliable and specialized foundation models for software engineering tasks. Subsequently, I’ll present some ongoing work from our lab focused on developing more robust foundation models for coding with the specific needs of software engineering in mind. This retrospective not only celebrates past achievements but also critically examines the present landscape, emphasizing the vital role of software engineering expertise in shaping the future of AI-assisted programming.
Bio: Mira Mezini is a LOEWE Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where she leads the Software Technology Lab. She is member of the board of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE and as founding co-director of the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence hessian.AI. She has served in the DFG and ERC computer science panels and since 2023 is currently a member of the DFG Senate. She is also co-spokesperson of the DFG Excellence Cluster on Reasonable AI (RAI).
Mezini’s research focuses on programming systems for reliable distributed software and AI, automated software analysis, and foundational code models. She has served as PC chair of major software engineering and programming languages conferences, including the European Conference on Programming (ECOOP), the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), the ACM Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), and the ACM/IEEE International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE). She received two IBM Eclipse Innovation Awards, a Google Research Award, and an ERC Advanced Grant. She is recipient of the 2025 senior Dahl-Nygard Prize, recognized as one of the most prestigious prizes in the area of software engineering. Mezini is a member of the German Academy of Engineering Sciences, acatech, the Academia Europaea, the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and was named an ACM Fellow in 2025.
