Keynotes
We invite influential speakers from around the world to serve as our keynote guests at this year’s conference. They will be sharing deep insights from their practical experience and project journeys, along with their insightful observations and visions for future trends.
The keynote speeches are not only a transfer of knowledge and experience but also a conversation that broadens perspectives, inviting us to rethink the connection between technology and the world. Whether you are an emerging talent or an experienced developer, you will find inspiration and strength in these talks.
Bryce Adelstein Lelbach
Accelerating Algorithm Autoresearch
Optimizing software has never been easier with the advent of agentic AI...
right? It turns out it's not quite that simple!
Autoresearch is a powerful technique for optimization; an agent iteratively
modifies, tests, and benchmarks changes to the codebase with the goal of
maximizing the benchmark score.
While powerful, this process faces challenges, especially at scale:
- Cheating / reward hacking (just as in reinforcement learning).
- Overfitting to benchmark's inputs.
- Tradeoffs between input breadth and build/test/benchmark cost.
- Local maximums.
In this talk, we'll discuss some of these challenges and how to overcome them,
based on examples from the open source GPUMODE kernel competitions and
infrastructure. We'll explore how to take autoresearch results from "cool idea"
to "shipped in production".
About the Speaker
Bryce Adelstein Lelbach has spent over a decade developing programming languages, compilers, and libraries. He is passionate about parallel programming and strives to make it more accessible for everyone.
Bryce is a Principal Engineer at NVIDIA, where he founded the CUDA Core Compute Libraries team and now leads the Vanguard Programming group that drives NVIDIA's roadmap for programming languages, compilers, and core libraries.
He is a leader of the systems programming language community, having served as chair of the C++ Library Evolution and the US programming language standards committee. He has been an organizer and program chair for many conferences over the years. On the C++ committee, he has worked on concurrency primitives, parallel algorithms, senders, and multidimensional arrays.
He previously worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Louisiana State University. He is one of the founding developers of the HPX parallel runtime system.
Outside of work, Bryce is passionate about airplanes and watches. He lives in Midtown Manhattan with his girlfriend and dog.
Tian Gao
From CPython to PySpark
For people who have never worked on large open source projects, these projects can feel a little
mysterious. We use them every day, but many people do not know how their developers joined
the project, what they usually work on, or what someone can do to become part of the
community.
I first started to contribute to a large open source project in 2022 and became a Python Core
Developer in 2024. In 2026, I became an Apache Spark Committer. Through my own story, I hope to make these large open source projects feel less mysterious. I also hope these experiences can give people who want to join similar projects a practical path to follow.
In this talk, I will first look back at how I went from being just a programmer to a Python Core
Developer. I will share how someone with no previous open source experience can start
contributing to an open source project.
Then I will talk about the work I have done on PySpark over the past year. Spark started as a
Scala project, but its Python part, PySpark, is both important and still rough in many places. As
a programmer brought in specifically to improve the Python experience, what kinds of things can
I work on?
Many of these tasks are things you may also be able to do, whether in your own project, in
Spark, or in another large open source project. Understanding this kind of work can help you
find a good place to start contributing. It can also help you improve the products built by you or your company.
About the Speaker
Databricks Engineer, Python Core Developer, pdb maintainer, Apache Spark Committer, Bilibili
uploader, still write and review code with my own brain.
More exciting keynote speakers will be announced soon, stay tuned!