Bertrand Meyer
Title: The Future of Verification in the age of AI
Abstract: Software verification is more necessary than ever but is also more elusive than ever in an era when Artificial Intelligence systems take society by storm, with results at the same time often impressive, sometimes scary, seldom accompanied by guarantees, and occasionally prone to dangerous hallucinations. Even non-AI developments are increasingly produced through AI techniques such as vibe coding. This talk will review what software verification means for various communities in academia and research, and its interaction with AI both ways: verifying AI software, and using AI for verification. It serves both as a survey assessing the current state of the art and as an attempt as a roadmap for the future of AI-aware verification.
Bio: Bertrand Meyer is Professor Emeritus at ETH Zurich, CTO of Eiffel Software, and professor of software engineering at Constructor Institute of Technology. His work has spanned programming methodology, programming languages, concurrency, project management (particularly agile methods), requirements engineering and formal methods. He is known in particular for his work on object-oriented technology and the concept of Design by Contract, illustrated in numerous books (such as Object-Oriented Software Construction, Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well Using Objects and Contracts, Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly, and the latest, Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis). His awards include ACM Software System Award, IEEE Harlan Mills Prize, Dahl-Nygaard Object Technology Award and ACM Fellow. His recent work has focused in particular on the convergence of proofs and tests, with articles at both ICTSS 2023 and 2025.