Keynotes Speaker
Professor Dr. Ganesh Bhutkar
Short Profile:
Dr Ganesh Bhutkar is a Professor and Assistant Head (Research) in the Department of Computer Engineering at Vishwakarma Institute of Technology (VIT), Pune, India. He is also Coordinator of Centre of Excellence in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) at VIT Pune. He is ME, MBA & has PhD in HCI from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, India. His research work is mainly focused on HCI, Assistive Technologies, AI and Software Engineering. He is an active member of international organisations such as ACM, IFIP WGs and SIGCHI. He is Vice Chair of the Europe-based research group – IFIP WG 13.8 on HWID. He has co-authored 10 international academic books with Springer, CRC and IGI Global. Currently, he is pursuing research work with Digital Trust, Dark Patterns and Recommendation Systems. He is a sports enthusiast and also, active cyclist with about 17,500+ km of cycle rides. He is the Founder-Secretary of NGO – Shirwal Gymkhana promoting sports and fitness activities.
Keynote Title: Research with Human-Centric Technology and AI
Short Abstract:
Several research projects are pursued in over 8 years at Centre of Excellence in HCI at VIT Pune, INDIA. These include research and development work with human-centric designs of mobile apps involving IoT and AI in collaboration with other research groups from international / national academic institutions and IT industries. There is a plan to share related research experiences and learnings with accessibility tools, medical apps, recommendation systems and AI-powered applications.
Manuel Rigger, PhD
Short Profile:
Manuel Rigger is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, where he leads the Trustworthy Engineering of Software Technologies (TEST) Lab. His research focuses on improving the reliability of important software systems, particularly database and other data-centric systems. Together with his students and collaborators, he has found more than 1,000 unique, previously unknown bugs, most of which the developers of these systems have fixed. Their work has received distinguished paper awards at ICSE 2023, EuroSys 2024, and USENIX Security 2025, distinguished artifact awards at ASPLOS 2022, OSDI 2020, and OOPSLA 2020, and industry research awards, including the 2024 AWS Database Services Amazon Research Award and the 2024 Google South Asia and Southeast Asia Research Award. Before joining NUS, Manuel was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, where he worked with Zhendong Su. He completed his PhD at Johannes Kepler University Linz under the supervision of Hanspeter Mössenböck.
Keynote Title: Toward Agentic Automated Testing for Database Systems
Short Abstract:
Ensuring the reliability of database systems is essential, yet increasingly challenging, as these systems grow in size, complexity, and diversity. In parallel, frontier models are creating new opportunities for automated bug finding. In this talk, I will present our past and ongoing work on automated testing techniques for database systems, which has uncovered hundreds of unique bugs in mature and widely used systems. I will first explain how we address the test oracle problem by constructing mechanisms that determine whether a database system produced the correct result for a given query, without requiring a separate reference implementation. I will then discuss how we are scaling these techniques across the growing ecosystem of databases. Finally, I will describe how our testing approaches have increasingly incorporated large language models, from generating dialect-specific test inputs to enabling more autonomous testing workflows.
Prof. Dr. Ir. FORD LUMBAN GAOL, S.Si., M.Kom., SMIEEE
Short Profile:
Prof. Dr. Ir. Ford Lumban Gaol, S.Si., M.Kom., SMIEEE is a distinguished academic and researcher in Computer Science. He currently serves as the Head of the Doctoral Program in Computer Science and Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Indonesia Chapter. He is also the President of the IIAI ASEAN Region, Tokyo, Japan. His international academic engagements include serving as a Visiting Professor at Sam Houston State University, Texas, USA, and an Adjunct Professor at Algoma University, Canada. His extensive leadership and international academic experience reflect his strong commitment to advancing computer science education, research, and global academic collaboration.
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