Boqi (Percy) Chen, Ph.D.
University of Ottawa
email: boqi⚫chen@uottawa⚫ca
I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of Ottawa. My research focuses on the reliable and robust integration of AI component, including LLMs and multi-agent systems, into software engineering processes, 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.
🎓 I am actively looking for motivated PhD and Master's students. If you are passionate about reliable AI systems, agentic workflow design, or AI for software engineering, I'd love to hear from you! See the Join the Journey page for details.
I received my PhD in 2025 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, supervised by Prof. Gunter Mussbacher and Prof.Daniel Varro. 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.
my research, in layers
System Layer
How to integrate AI components into software systems in a reliable and robust way, including reliable workflow construction (MODELS'25) and system-level evaluation (MODELS'25, ICSE'25).
Traditional Software Component Layer
Create reliable software components that wrap around AI components to provide assurance, guarantees and fallback mechanisms (ASE'22, RE'25, MODELS'25)
AI Component Layer
How to provide reliability and robustness guarantees by design for AI components, including prompting, agentic architecture, and decoding strategies (FSE'26 IVR).
I also organize a bi-weekly (sometimes weekly) discussion group on graph models 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.
news
| Jul 10, 2026 | I’m at BTMM 2026 from July 10th to 11th |
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| Jul 05, 2026 | I’m at FSE 2026 in Montreal from July 5th to 9th |
| May 01, 2026 | I officially started as an assistant professor at uOttawa! |
| Apr 20, 2026 | I will give a talk about trustworthy AI for SE at SEMLA 2026 in Montreal |
| Mar 17, 2026 | Two papers accepted at FSE 2026 IVR track on projectional decoding and spec-driven engineering. See you in Montreal! |
selected publications
- FSE
Projectional Decoding: Towards Semantic-Aware LLM GenerationIn Companion Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE Companion), Ideas, Visions and Reflections Track, 2026, Montreal, Canada, July 5-9 , 2026 - MODELS
MCeT: Behavioral Model Correctness Evaluation using Large Language ModelsIn ACM / IEEE 28th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), 2025, Grand Rapids, USA, October 5-10, 2025 , 2025