Keynote Speaker
Associate Professor, Columbia University; Amazon Scholar
Title: The Next Era of Software Engineering: From Writing Code to Engineering Trust
Talk Abstract: Software engineering has always evolved by making software creation easier, from high-level programming languages and integrated development environments to cloud computing and DevOps. Today, generative AI is accelerating this trend dramatically. As AI software engineers become increasingly capable, writing code is rapidly becoming one of the least expensive parts of software development. This changes the fundamental bottleneck of our field.
The central challenge is no longer producing software, but establishing confidence that software behaves correctly, securely, and consistently with human intent. Future software engineering will increasingly focus on engineering trust: understanding legacy systems, inferring specifications, verifying AI-generated changes, enforcing security and compliance, and enabling humans and AI agents to collaborate safely on mission-critical software.
In this keynote, I will argue that software engineering is entering a new era where verification, behavioral reasoning, executable knowledge, and trustworthy human–AI collaboration become first-class engineering activities. Rather than asking how AI can write more code, we should ask a more fundamental question: How do we build software systems, and AI software engineers, that organizations can truly trust?
Panelists
Professor and Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University
Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, McGill University
Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, York University
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Concordia University