SEMLA 2026: Thoughts and Thanks After Three Days on Agentic Software Engineering

Created on June 04, 2026 , last updated on September 03, 2026

2026

The SEMLA 2026 banner. Five students walk away from the camera along a road on the Polytechnique Montréal campus, past trees and a glass building. Overlaid in white is the title 'Software Engineering For Machine Learning Applications Symposium', with the theme 'Engineering Trustworthy and Cost-Effective AI Multi-Agents' and the details 'June 1st to June 3rd, 2026, Polytechnique Montréal'. Four blocks of yellow text surround it: 25 speakers, 3 tutorials, 100-150 participants each day, 3 keynotes, and in the centre, 'Thank you!'

With SEMLA 2026 now over, I wanted to offer some thoughts and thanks.

I served as General Chair of this year’s edition, held June 1–3, 2026 at Polytechnique Montréal on the theme of Engineering Trustworthy and Cost-Effective AI Multi-Agents. These three days have been great to connect with the industrial and academic perspectives on the challenges and consequences of integrating agentic and “classic” software engineering (SE). With 25 speakers and about 100 to 150 participants each day, there was a rich discussion at the forefront of SE.

Thanks to the speakers

Thank you to the speakers, for sharing their knowledge with us. The talks and tutorials were rich and filled with technical detail.

A special thanks to the keynotes of Peter Rigby, about handling agentic SE at scale at Meta; Tanja Tajmel, about keeping the impact on humans and the world on our minds; and Maxime Lamothe, about why digitizing municipalities has many technical and social challenges. I also enjoyed the panel on the future of SE, featuring a surprise guest, Lionel Briand.

Thanks to the organizers

Thank you to my fellow organizers, who came together once again to deliver a strong program with world-class speakers. The success of the event is due to each of us doing our part. Particular thanks to the student volunteers for helping guide everyone and keep it all running smoothly.

Thanks to the audience

And finally the audience, who showed up in great numbers to the whole program. It was fantastic to see filled rooms, animated discussions over lots of coffee and orange juice, and many insightful questions.

I hope everyone enjoyed this year’s edition of SEMLA! See you next time, or at FSE in July!