The Station Biologique des Laurentides (SBL) is a field station of the Université de Montréal located in Saint-Hippolyte, about 90 km north of Montréal. Surrounded by forests and lakes, it offers a peaceful and stimulating environment for scientific discussions, seminars, and collaborative work.

The GEODES Research Group will hold its Annual Research Retreat there from September 5 to 7. This event is an opportunity to reflect on past achievements, plan research directions for the coming year, and strengthen collaborations within the group.

GEODES Research Retreat 2025 Program

Annual Research Workshop

Friday, September 5 (morning) – Saturday, September 6 (lunch)

Each member of the group will present and discuss their research plans for the coming year. These sessions are designed to foster constructive feedback, identify synergies within the group, and align research goals with ongoing projects.

We are pleased to welcome Luciano Marchezan, a newly arrived postdoctoral researcher in the group, as our keynote speaker. He will present his research at the Institute of Software Systems Engineering (ISSE) in Linz, Austria.

Writing Session

Saturday, September 6 (afternoon) – Sunday, September 7 (afternoon)

Dedicated writing sessions will be held for members preparing submissions to FSE2026, ICSE2026, or other major software engineering conferences and journals. The goal is to provide a focused environment that encourages productivity, peer feedback, and mutual support in the writing process.

This fall, GEODES hosted the latest SEMTL at the University of Montreal. The event started with a keynote by new assistant professor Damien Masson on Designing Interfaces That Adapt to Their Users. It featured presentations from GEODES Ph.D. students and ended with a panel on Software Visualization, discussing software quality, modeling languages, and AI models.

GEODES stood out at the MODELS conference this year, with Meriem taking second place and Pascal third in the ACM Student Research Competition. Congrats to both!

A special congratulations to Oussama and Houari, who were honored with the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for their paper, Improving the Learning of Code Review Successive Tasks with Cross-Task Knowledge Distillation.

GEODES is advancing research and invites you to explore our publications on Google Scholar. We’re committed to innovation, collaboration, and supporting the next generation of software engineering researchers. Stay tuned for updates!

Check out our recent accomplishments:

• Improving the Learning of Code Review Successive Tasks with Cross-Task Knowledge Distillation by Oussama BEN SGHAIER and Houari SAHRAOUI has been accepted for FSE 2024.

• Toward Optimal Psychological Functioning in AI-driven Software Engineering Tasks: The SEWELL-CARE Assessment Framework by Oussama BEN SGHAIER, Jean-Sébastien Boudrias, and Houari SAHRAOUI will be published in IEEE Software.

• Improving Repair of Semantic ATL Errors using a Social Diversity Metric by Zahra VARAMINYBAHNEMIRY, Jessie GALASSO-CARBONNEL, Bentley James OAKES, and Houari SAHRAOUI will appear in Software & Systems Modeling.

• Rationale Dataset and Analysis for the Commit Messages of the Linux Kernel Out-of-Memory Killer by Mouna DHAOUADI, Bentley James OAKES, and Michalis FAMELIS has been accepted for ICPC 2024.

Two of our members, Martin WEYSSOW and Mouna DHAOUADI, presented their work at FSE 2023.
Mouna won third place in the Student Research Competition track.

Martin presented his work On the Usage of Continual Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Pre-trained Language Models of Code, co-authored with Xin ZHOU, Kisub KIM, David LO, and Houari SAHRAOUI. A preprint version is available here.

Mouna won third place in the Student Research Competition track for her work A Data set of Extracted Rationale from Linux Kernel Commit Messages.

Mouna will be presenting her work A Data set of Extracted Rationale from Linux Kernel Commit Messages at ESEC/FSE 2023, as part of the Student Research Competition track.

ACM-W scholarship

ACM-W provides support for women undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and related programs to attend computer science research conferences. ACM-W scholarships are divided between scholarships of up to $600 for intra-continental conference travel, and scholarships of up to $1200 for intercontinental conference travel.

St-Pierre-Larochelle Fellowship

Created in 2022 by the Angèle St-Pierre Family and Hugo Larochelle, the St-Pierre-Larochelle Fellowship aims to attract a PhD student (at Université de Montréal) specializing in machine learning whose research revolves around environmental issues and look at how AI can help protect the environment.

Our paper on On the Usage of Continual Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Pre-trained Language Models of Code by Martin WEYSSOW, Xin ZHOU, Kisub KIM, David LO, and Houari SAHRAOUI has been accepted for publication at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2023).

Some of our members presented their work at MODELS 2023.
Our paper Digital Twins for Cyber-Biophysical Systems: Challenges and Lessons Learned by Istvan David, Pascal Archambault, Quentin Wolak, Cong Vinh Vu, Timothé Lalonde, Kashif Riaz, Houari Sahraoui and Eugene Syriani won the Best practice track paper award.

Our group organized a SEMTL meeting at Station Biologiques des Laurentides to enable researchers in software engineering from various groups to share their work. This gathering allowed us to foster ideas about future research and start new collaborations.

The SEMTL meeting was part of a two-day research retreat (Sep. 8, 2023 – Sep 9, 2023).

Research retreat

Day one: SEMTL meeting

Day one was dedicated to the SEMTL meeting, beginning with a keynote, then short presentations, and closing with a social event. The aim was to encourage contact between institutions in Montreal and ensure that researchers have another venue to share their work and start collaborations.

Day two: GEODES at work (and having fun)

Day two was dedicated to the activities within our group.

Our paper on Digital Twins for Cyber-Biophysical Systems: Challenges and Lessons Learned by Istvan David, Pascal Archambault, Quentin Wolak, Cong Vinh Vu, Houari Sahraoui, Eugene Syriani, and our industry partners at Ferme d’Hiver, Timothé Lalonde and Kashif Riaz has been accepted for MODELS 2023.

Our paper on Model consistency as a heuristic for eventual correctness, by Istvan David, Eugene Syriani, and Hans Vangheluwe has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Computer Languages.

In related news, Pascal’s short paper at ANNSIM on Co-Simulation For Controlled Environment Agriculture will be published soon by SCS.