Professor Andreas Zeller, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (DE)
To celebrate the achievements of IPN in the past 25 years, IPN is organising a special, online series of colloquia in which world-renowned computer scientists give their view on the progress in, and future of the field of computer science. These colloquia will feature thought-provoking presentations that are of interest to a broad (academic) computer science audience. Although these colloquia are initially aimed at the Dutch computer science community, they are open to interested people around the world!
Abstract
Most of today‘s AI coding assistance is based on the principles of Large Language Models (LLMs) – learning common token sequences from millions of annotated code examples, and then adapting them into the desired context. However, this “observation-only” approach has two problems: First, the reservoir of available code to learn from is limited; second, reasoning from abstract code to concrete executions is not a task LLMs have shown to excel at. In this talk, I sketch how future AI systems will be able to massively experiment with programs, their inputs, and their code in order to automatically learn how these programs behave, to predict the effects of their inputs and code changes, and in return predict and suggest actions on how to achieve arbitrary effects. Such AI systems will act as artificial program experts, tirelessly accumulating knowledge about the code and its environment, and – in contrast to current AI coders – be perceived as “super coders” that may become way more competent than the most experienced programmers: “Is there an input that bypasses authorization, and which is it?”
Andreas Zeller is faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University. His research on automated debugging, mining software archives, specification mining, and security testing has proven highly influential. Zeller is one of the few researchers to have received two ERC Advanced Grants, most recently for his S3 project. Zeller is an ACM Fellow and holds an ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.
Date, Time, Location
The colloquium will take place on December 15, 2025, 16:00 – 17:00 (CEST).
The colloquium will be hosted as a Teams webinar. You can join the colloquium via teams.
We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Afterwards you can find the recording and other recordings on the IPN colloquia overview page.