Colloque du Mehrdad Sabetzadeh - Oct 29, 14h

[Michalis Famelis]

Bonjour,

Je vous invite cordialement au colloque invité du professeur Mehrdad
Sabetzadeh de l'Université d'Ottawa le mercredi 29 octobre à 14h au
local 6214 du Pavillon André-Aisenstadt. Le colloque sera en anglais.

Hello, you are cordially invited to the invited talk by
professor Mehrdad Sabetzadeh of the University of Ottawa on Wednesday
October 29 at 2pm in room 6214 of the Pavillon André-Aisenstadt. The
talk will be in english.

Titre:

Making Models Great Again: Model Construction in the Age of Large
Language Models

Resumé:

Model-driven engineering is undergoing a major resurgence, driven by
advances in large language models (LLMs) that significantly reduce the
effort required to create, evolve, and maintain models from
natural-language descriptions. In this talk, I draw on two industry
collaborations, one with Kinaxis on optimization modelling and another
with Ciena on system design, to examine whether LLM-assisted model
construction is mature enough to make modelling more efficient and
practical in real-world settings. Through these collaborations, we ask
not only whether LLMs can create models of sufficient quality, but also,
given that LLMs have been exposed to considerably more code than models
during pre-training, whether the cost–benefit still favours explicit
model building or if code can increasingly serve as a pragmatic
substitute. Several empirically grounded observations emerge from our
studies: (1) iterative model improvement that combines formal checks
with LLM-based semantic refinement consistently yields higher quality
models; (2) reasoning LLMs outperform instruction-following ones for
tasks involving abstraction and constraint reasoning; and (3) executable
models can match code in correctness and executability while offering
the inherent advantages of modelling such as abstraction and
understandability.

Bio:

Dr. Mehrdad (Mike) Sabetzadeh is a Professor of Software Engineering at
the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on applying artificial
intelligence and model-driven engineering to improve the quality,
compliance, and trustworthiness of complex software-intensive systems.
He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals and
conferences in the field of software engineering. His work has received
several Distinguished or Best Paper Awards and has had a broad impact
across academia and industry. Dr. Sabetzadeh has led research projects
totaling over C$10 million and has collaborated extensively with
industry partners across Canada, Europe, and the United States. He is
currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Software
Engineering and Empirical Software Engineering, and regularly serves on
the program and organizing committees of premier conferences such as
ICSE, FSE, ASE, MODELS, and RE.

Bien cordialement,

--
Michalis Famelis
____________________________
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~famelis/