Boqi (Percy) Chen, Ph.D.

✨ I will be joining the University of Ottawa as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) starting May 2026! If you are interested in working with me, please feel free to reach out!

I received my PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, supervised by Prof. Gunter Mussbacher and Prof. Daniel Varro. My research focuses on the reliable and robust integration of AI components, including LLMs, in software engineering applications, with an emphasis on model-based validation techniques and principled agentic workflow design. I am also broadly interested in evaluating the quality and properties of ML models for software engineering tasks such as code generation, bug detection, and code summarization.

During my PhD, I worked as an R&D engineer at Aggregate Intellect through a Mitacs grant and as a part-time research associate at Huawei Waterloo Research Center. I was also an active contributor to the open-source project Sherpa, a large language model framework for robust agentic applications.

I believe reliable and robust integration of AI components requires a layered approach, as illustrated below.

I also organize a bi-weekly (sometimes weekly) discussion group on graph neural networks and their applications. You can find the scedules here. If you are interested in joining, please subscribe to this calendar. We are also actively looking for new speakers, so if you are interested in presenting your work or any topics you are interested in, please feel free to reach out to me.