It is a great honour to welcome Professor Jin Song Dong, Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS), as the keynote speaker in the CDS Distinguished Lecture Series. Professor Dong will deliver a lecture entitled “Reasoning Beyond LLM: Code, Design, Strategy, and a Vision for Life After AGI: The Player Era.”

Speaker:

Prof. Jin Song DONG
Professor
School of Computing
National University of Singapore (NUS)

Date:

10 February 2026 (Tuesday)

Time:

2:00pm – 3:00pm

Venue:

CB328, Chow Yei Ching Building, The University of Hong Kong (Zoom broadcasting)

Lecture theater 1A, G/F, CDS-1 Building, HKU-CDS Shanghai Teaching and Research Site (On-site)

Abstract:
The rise of code-centric Large Language Models (LLMs) has reshaped the software engineering world with tools like Copilot, DeepSeek, GPT-5, and Gemini-3 that can easily generate code. However, there is no guarantee of correctness for the code generated by LLMs, which suffer from the hallucination problem. The first part of this talk demonstrates that the program refinement calculus can be utilized as a formal-chain-of-thought to guide LLMs and verify the correctness of the LLM-generated code [POPL 2025]. The second part of this talk investigates LLM-aided System Design and Validation, where LLM-enhanced model-checking agents are developed [ICML 2025, NeurPIS 2025, ASE 2025]. The third part of this talk highlights the limitations of LLMs in solving complex planning and strategy analysis problems that require formal symbolic reasoning techniques [ICLR 2025, AAAI 2026]. At the end of this presentation, a new vision, “Player Era” for life after AGI, will be discussed. This new vision proposes that humanity will evolve into four distinct yet interconnected roles: the Player, the Explorer, the Co-Creator, and the Gate-Keeper, which serve as the pillars of a civilization redesigned for meaning, creativity, and responsibility. 

   

Biography:

Jin-Song Dong is a professor at the National University of Singapore. His research spans a range of fields, including formal methods with LLM agents, safety and security systems, trusted AI, probabilistic reasoning, sports analytics, and verified LLM code synthesis. He co-founded the commercialized PAT verification system, which has garnered thousands of registered users from over 150 countries. Jin Song also co-founded the commercialized trusted machine learning system Silas (www.depintel.com), with 50K+ downloads. He served on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Formal Aspects of Computing, and Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, A NASA Journal. He has successfully supervised 34 PhD students, many of whom have become tenured faculty members at leading universities worldwide. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers Australia. Jin Song developed Markov Decision Process (MDP) models for tennis strategy analysis using PAT, assisting professional players with pre-match analysis (beating the world’s best). He created a new conference series on Sports Analytics (https://formal-analysis.com/isace/2026/).In his spare time, he serves as a tennis coach, taking pleasure in coaching his students and his three children, all of whom have reached the #1 national junior ranking in Singapore/Australia. Two of his children have earned NCAA Division I full scholarships in the US.  

All are welcome to attend.