GAISE26 Speakers

Alex Polyakov is the founder and CEO of ProjectSimple.ai, a platform built to address the gap between tracking work and actually delivering software. A 25+ year engineering leader and serial founder, he helps organizations move past fragmented tools by bringing real-time visibility, structured execution, and AI-driven insight into delivery risk and outcomes. He hosts the “Let’s Talk Agile” podcast and writes about where Agile, AI, and modern software delivery collide.

About this talk

AI is changing far more than how code is written. Software systems are starting to observe, decide, and act with decreasing human involvement, forcing organizations to rethink how software engineering actually works. This keynote explores what’s already dead, what’s rapidly dying, and what’s emerging — from collapsing Agile processes to AI agents, self-healing systems, and continuously adapting software delivery.

Tommi Mikkonen is a professor of software engineering at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Throughout his career, he has been prototyping new ways to design, develop, and deploy software while working at the cross-section of academic and industry settings. He has been leading two research projects on GenAI native software development, combining the best parts of AI-supported and classical software engineering. He has authored over 500 scientific publications and supervised over 500 theses.

About this talk

Coding agents now write significant portions of production software, and the interesting question is no longer whether they work — it is what happens to the humans around them. Velocity rises; memory thins. Provenance becomes opaque, expertise erodes through delegation, and maintainability quietly degrades behind a veneer of progress.

The talk argues that behavioral code analysis — reading code through its social signals rather than its syntax — is the discipline that keeps hybrid teams from hollowing out. Knowledge distribution, ownership, and coordination are the load-bearing structures that determine whether AI augments a team or replaces the wrong parts of it.

Drawing on a dual vantage at CodeScene and Lund University, the talk shares research highlights, candid reflections from the tool-vendor side of the table, and new case study results with partner loveholidays — a working picture of what hybrid development looks like when engineered deliberately.

About this workshop session

Tomas Herda

Tomas Herda is Product Owner & Team Lead for Intelligent Document Processing at Post Business Solutions. He is Chairman of the Industrial Advisory Board of GPT-Lab (Tampere University), author of Prompting Blueprints, and VibeX 2026 Workshop Co-Chair at EASE 2026 Conference.

Agnes Lipovits

Agnes Lipovits is an AI Developer at Post Business Solutions, specializing in Intelligent Document Processing and AI-driven automation. Previously she worked at the University of Pannonia focusing on computer vision, machine learning, and medical image processing.

Veli-Pekka “Wellu” Eloranta, PhD, is the founder of Curious and works as agentic builder and trainer. He has been in the software industry since 2003 — as a developer, agile and AI coach and team lead — and has co-authored two books on software engineering: Designing Distributed Control Systems (Wiley, 2014) and A Scrum Book (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2019). Today his focus is on agentic software development and helping organisations make the shift toward AI-driven ways of working.

Sami Lahti is co-founder and CTO of Koivu Solutions Oy. Today his focus is on generative AI — especially agentic approaches that can reliably produce production-quality software. His GAISE26 talk covers how to use agentic skills to build new applications with production-grade code, and what frameworks and practices are designed for AI-native development. A key theme is organizational change: shifting feature development from traditional developers to customer-facing experts through well-designed AI workflows, while developers evolve into quality control and platform enablement roles.

About this talk

AI coding tools generate code at impressive speed — but regulators, auditors, and on-call engineers don’t ask for code: they ask for evidence, traceability, and intent. In regulated domains, “vibe coding” with raw LLMs is a liability, not an asset.

The talk argues for a shift in perspective: the source code is no longer the source of truth — the specification is. Code becomes a disposable, regenerable artifact; the spec, the risk model, and the traceability graph are what teams actually need to maintain. The session includes a live demo illustrating that spec-driven agentic development is shipping production-grade software today.

About this workshop session

Prof. Xiaofeng Wang

Xiaofeng Wang is one of the founding architects of software startup research as a discipline. She is Professor of Software Engineering at LUT University and founder of the Software Startup Research Network. Before LUT, she spent over a decade at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Her work cuts across agile and lean development, software innovation, and the human and social fabric that decides whether teams build things people want.

Daniel Planötscher

Daniel Planötscher is a PhD researcher at unibz. His research explores AI’s impact on upstream software engineering activities, Human–AI collaboration, and AI-native software development. He also works in a major IT company engaged in its AI transformation journey.

Silvia Cortesia

Silvia Cortesia is a PhD researcher at unibz and unitn working on entrepreneurship and venture capital in the age of generative AI. Her research investigates how AI reshapes early-stage venture dynamics and VC decision-making. She also designs AI-driven automation systems for SMEs in industry.

About this workshop session

François Christophe

François Christophe works as a researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. Passionate about cognitive systems, he is arguably one of the first in Finland to apply Natural Language Processing techniques to the early stages of Systems Engineering since 2009. He defended his PhD thesis in 2012 on analyzing large natural language documents and automatically extracting requirements for system specification. He has worked across a wide range of AI positions, from integrating biological neuron cells into computation at University of Tampere to leading the Robotics research group at Hämeen University of Applied Sciences.

Konsta Kalliokoski

Konsta Kalliokoski is a Project Researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, where his work focuses on agentic systems across the software development lifecycle and enterprise architecture, with emphasis on multi-agent systems and approaches to modeling them. He brings an industry perspective from his prior career as a software architect in the mining sector.

Juha Savolainen is a part-time professor of practice at the University of Jyväskylä. He has held several management positions at Danfoss, including head of R&D for the Digital Services Business unit and head of global software for Danfoss Drives. In addition, he has worked for Roche Diagnostics and Nokia Research. He holds a Doctor of Science degree in software engineering from Aalto University. He has written over 70 peer-reviewed publications.

Mika Saari is a researcher and educator at Tampere University, Vice Head of the GPT-Lab research group. His work focuses on sustainable software engineering practices. He currently leads the BioAI project and has previously led the Agrihub project, exploring generative AI in domain-specific contexts. His broader research interests include IoT and AI-assisted software engineering.

Jussi Rasku is a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University and Vice Head of the GPT-Lab research group. With a background in machine learning, optimization, and real-world systems such as vehicle routing and resource planning, his work centers on how organizations adopt AI and LLM-based systems in operational settings and how human–AI collaboration reshapes software engineering.

Dr. Muhammad Waseem is a postdoctoral researcher and Vice-Head of GPT-Lab at Tampere University. His work focuses on transforming research ideas into hands-on prototypes, AI-assisted tools, and experimental platforms for real-world software engineering and business contexts.

Kai-Kristian Kemell is Head of GPT-Lab and a postdoctoral research fellow at Tampere University, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences. His research focuses on software engineering processes, practices, and methods, and other organizational and business aspects of IT, such as software business. He has 60+ peer-reviewed scientific publications and is the recipient of multiple best paper awards.

Salla Westerstrand is a technology ethicist who helps people, organisations and societies thrive in times of digital disruption. In her research, she studies ethical and societal impacts of AI and how to govern them. As a practitioner, she advises organisations on ethical AI innovation, focusing on high-risk sector use cases. She holds a PhD in Information Systems and has a multidisciplinary background in social science and language studies. She is CEO of Harmless Consulting, vice-president of Sustinaires ry, and has served as an advisor for several AI transformation projects across Europe.

About this workshop session

Ayman Ahad Khan

Ayman Ahad Khan is a researcher and developer at the intersection of Agentic Workflows, Multi-Agent Systems, and Software Engineering at GPT-Lab, Tampere University. He works on pushing adaptive, explainable, and human-centered AI engineering forward.

Tools to install before the workshop

Please have all three installed and working before you arrive:

1. Ollama (local LLM runtime)
macOS/Windows: ollama.com/download
macOS (Homebrew): brew install ollama then ollama serve
Linux: curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh then ollama serve
Verify: ollama --version

2. Python 3.11 (backend)
macOS: brew install [email protected] or python.org/downloads
Windows/Linux: python.org/downloads (Windows: tick “Add Python to PATH”)
Verify: python3.11 --version

3. Node.js 18+ (web UI)
macOS: brew install node or nodejs.org (LTS)
Windows/Linux: nodejs.org (LTS version)
Verify: node --version (must be v18 or higher)

Zeeshan Rasheed

Zeeshan Rasheed is a final-year doctoral researcher at Tampere University, based in the GPT Lab. His research focuses on Agentic AI, where he explores the use of AI agents for software engineering tasks, with a particular focus on understanding the role of agents in real-world industrial scenarios. He brings over 6 years of experience working across both industry and academia in the field of AI. He completed his Master’s degree in China in 2021.

Md Aidul Islam

Md Aidul Islam is a Researcher at GPT Lab, Tampere University, Finland, with a background in full stack and mobile application development and AI-driven software engineering. He is interested in applying AI to solve real-world problems which can be solved by software solutions. His current research focus is agentic AI memory management and multi-agent systems.

Chalisa Veesommai Sillberg is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tampere University’s GPT-Lab and contributor to research initiatives such as the Generative Artificial Intelligence in Business Support (GENT) project. Her research focuses on the EU AI Act and its practical implementation, particularly in supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing safe and compliant AI systems. Her work includes the strategy book Navigating Compliance: Strategic Guidance for SMEs under the EU AI Act and the TESSA tool, both developed within the GENT project. In addition to her work on AI governance, she contributes to information and data analysis across a range of environmental research domains.

Jiri Härmä has over ten years of industry experience across manufacturing, consulting, and sales. He has worked in ICT sales and project management, and has built expertise in analytics, machine learning, and applied artificial intelligence. He works as a doctoral researcher at Tampere University with the GPT-Lab research group and as a Sales Manager at Tieto. During his doctoral studies, he has contributed to research projects such as MAISA and FAIR 2.0. His dissertation examines sovereign generative AI especially from a business and organisational point of view.

About this talk

Tiina Karhukivi

Tiina Karhukivi is a Project Researcher at GPT-Lab, Tampere University. Her work sits at the intersection of Generative AI, large language models, and software engineering. Since 2017 she has worked as a Software Engineer, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach in both consulting and product companies. A Certified Scrum Master with a wide technical background spanning C++, C#, Python and modern software development practices, she is particularly interested in how AI-powered tools are reshaping the way software teams work and deliver value.

Mika Suominen

Mika Suominen is an ICT Engineering student and Research Assistant at GPT-Lab, Tampere University. Working within the GENT project, his role involves bringing practical Generative AI solutions and workflow automation concepts to organizations. Combining a solid background in commercial management with modern technology studies, he focuses on making new AI developments accessible and useful for business environments.