LASIGE Talks are fortnightly/monthly events to publicize recently distinguished publications or ongoing cutting-edge work by researchers from the research centre, consolidating the scientific culture of the LASIGE community.

Speakers: Manuel Piçarra and Catarina Gamboa
Date: November 04th, 2026, Wednesday, 12:00
Where: C6.3.27

12:00 Talk by Catarina Gamboa
12:20 Talk by Manuel Piçarra
12:40 Q&A + Break for snacks & coffee

Talk1: Barista: Synthesizing Typestate Specifications with LLM Agents
Speaker: Catarina Gamboa
Publication: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3832783.3834427
Summary: Object-oriented classes encode implicit protocols (e.g., connecting a socket before sending data) that Java cannot check at compile time, but typestate systems can. These, however, require that protocols be specified. We present Barista, an agentic workflow that extracts protocols from documentation using LLMs, DFA-guided extraction, test synthesis, and verification-driven refinement to produce verifiable LiquidJava specifications. Evaluated on 35 classes, Barista achieved 87.0% precision and 68.3% recall; 75% of specifications were usable as-is or with minor edits. We show that it reduces manual annotation and enables compile-time protocol safety for well-documented libraries.

Talk2: How VR Systems Impact Virtual Navigation for Blind People
Speaker: Manuel Piçarra
Publication: https://techandpeople.github.io/downloads/2026_HowVRSystemsImpactVirtualNavigationforBlindPeople.pdf
Summary: We investigated how using VR and Game Controllers impacts performance in navigation tasks, for blind people. Additionally, as virtual environments can offer various degrees of complexity, we observed how participants performed under different cognitive demands. Our findings showed that VR improved navigation performance, whereas adding a simultaneous cognitive task decreased performance in both conditions.