SERIQ meeting
Rentrée SERIQ
The first meeting under the SERIQ banner, continuing the SEMTL meeting series. It marks the move to a larger network, one that will grow to cover Quebec, and brings the community together to discuss what software engineering contributes to the challenges of the digital society.
Thursday, October 29, 2026
- Time
- 3:00–7:00 p.m.
- Venue
- Université de Montréal
The building and room will be confirmed before the meeting.
Programme
- Guest speakers from research and industry. Each presents their view of software research in 15 minutes:
- A panel where the speakers discuss the topics more broadly.
- University representatives speak after the panel.
- A networking reception, with student posters.
Guest speakers
Further speakers will be announced as they are confirmed.
Open source as a research method: from the scientific paper to billions of devices
Open-source libraries such as simdjson and simdutf now run in Node.js, in browsers and in databases, serving billions of people every day. The linear model of innovation — the professor publishes, the engineer reads, the customer consumes — rarely describes what actually happens. As Michael Stonebraker pointed out, ideas come mostly from contact with real users and their concrete problems. Open source is not merely a way to disseminate results: it is a research method in its own right. It enforces reproducibility, since the code and the benchmarks are public and anyone can check them. Code reviews, bug reports and pull requests amount to a peer review that is often more demanding than many review committees. It also brings in real-world data: adversarial cases, exotic architectures and unforeseen workloads. The story of simdjson reverses the expected order: first the code, a blog post, GitHub and a few posts on X, then industrial adoption, and only then the scientific paper. The cycle repeats: use reveals the next bottleneck, hence the Eisel-Lemire algorithm for floating-point numbers and simdutf for UTF-8. The approach has its tensions, however: maintenance is thankless and never-ending, and academic incentives count papers, not concrete contributions.
Daniel Lemire is a professor of computer science at the Université du Québec (TÉLUQ). His research and engineering work covers high-performance computing, efficient data structures and software performance optimization. He is the author of widely adopted open-source libraries: his algorithms and his code are found in several standard libraries and major systems, including .NET, Rust, Go, Node.js, Google Chrome and Safari. He is among the top 2 % of most-cited scientists worldwide according to the Stanford University / Elsevier ranking. He is an editor of the journal Software: Practice and Experience (Wiley, founded in 1971) and received the Université du Québec’s 2020 Research Excellence Award for his work on accelerating JSON document processing. On GitHub, he is among the 1000 most-followed developers out of more than 100 million. He is @lemire on X and writes a weekly blog at https://lemire.me/.
Student posters
Students who would like to present a poster during the networking reception can submit a proposal with the submission form.