ICSE 2026 - Rio
A few weeks ago I visited Rio de Janeiro for ICSE 2026. It was epic.
Earlier this year I published a short paper on securing software build systems at the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), and so this past April I flew to Rio de Janeiro to present my work. Long story short, my talk went extremely well, I made many new friends, and fell in love with the beauty of Brazil. I encourage you to check out this YouTube recording of my talk, and to keep reading this post for the details and pictures of my trip.
I touched down in Rio at the GIG airport on Tuesday, April 14th, at around 8pm, after Delta delayed my flight by about 10 hours due to electrical issues with the plane I was supposed to travel on. After finally arriving in Rio, I caught an Uber with Brandon Paulsen and Iulian Neamtiu to the conference venue, the Windsor Oceanico Hotel. When we arrived, we were surprised to discover a large group of people singing and lighting fireworks in front of the hotel adjacent to ours, the Windsor Barra. I later found out that these revelers were fans of the Argentinian soccer team, whose players were staying at the Windsor Barra. Another conference goer, Daye Nam, told me that she even saw the team at the hotel’s pool! Although I don’t watch sports, I thought that was neat.
The conference began the next morning, on April 15th. This ICSE I wanted to focus on networking, and so after attending the keynote, I went to the break area to meet other conference-goers. I soon ran into my friend Demetrius Hernandez, who I had first met earlier this year in Seattle while attending the CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop.
Demetrius is highly extroverted, and helped introduce me to other researchers. After spending an hour or two networking, I attended some of the conference presentations. Specifically, I decided to heed the advice of Dr. Kevin Moran (another faculty member at UCF), and focused on attending the talks for publications which had received the Distinguished Paper award. This turned out to be a good idea, as the talks I attended for these papers were on average better than the other talks I sat in on.
After several more hours of attending talks and networking, it was time for me to attend the ICSE 2026 banquet. The banquet this year was held in the awesome Costa Brava Clube. Situated atop a mountain on an island, connected to the mainland by a narrow bridge lined with lights, the club seems like something out of a movie.
The banquet was great, and it was full of people. Although the conference organizers tried to mitigate this issue by dividing banquet attendance into two groups across two separate days, with about 1600 ICSE attendees, the venue was still packed. But I still had a great time. At one point, a live band began playing percussion instruments, and two elaborately-dressed dancers took to the dance floor.
This was all really cool, but I left shortly after the band appeared because I usually dislike being around loud music for prolonged periods of time. I also wanted to get back to the hotel so I could rest and prepare for my talk the next day.
I gave my talk the following morning, on April 16th. Not only did it go very well, but to my pleasant surprise, many of the other talks in the same session were also great (which unfortunately is a bit of an oddity at these academic conferences). Afterwards I was able to talk about supply chain security with Sivana Hamer, Ben Swierzy, and a few other young researchers. Sivana in particular gave me some great research papers to check out, and I was able to commiserate over the pains of using Latex (and nerd out over Typst) with Ben.
Later that week I decided to explore Brazil with some of the new friends I had made at the conference, and began by taking a cable car up to Pão de Açúcar. Pão de Açúcar, known in English as Sugarloaf, is a mountain on the coast of Rio that’s a hot spot for tourism. To reach its peak, one first takes a cable car to the top of Morro da Urca.
After reaching the top of Morro da Urca, I snapped this photo of myself in front of a helipad. Rio is behind me, and in the top-left corner you can just barely see the statue of Christ the Redeemer.
I then took another cable car to the top of Pão de Açúcar. The view from the mountain peak was of course picturesque.
After taking the cable cars back down, I went to the AquaRio aquarium. The aquarium had a few fish I had never seen in-person before, including piranhas and mudskippers! Most of the fish were quite active, as well.
From AquaRio I traveled to the Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro. Aside from massive flora, the garden also had monkeys. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the baby monkey I saw (I think it was a marmoset), so instead here’s a picture of some giant lilypads.
Finally, I rounded out my trip by attending a live bossa nova performance at the Little Club, on the Beco das Garrafas in Copacabana. I don’t go out of my way to listen to jazz, but one of the friends I had made, Saketh Kasibatla, recommended we check it out. I’m so glad he did, because the performance was truly outstanding. Although it was only an hour long, from the moment I sat down I was enthralled. Here’s a seven-second clip of the show.
And that concludes my trip. While I do feel like I made the most of my trip, I know that this only scratches the surface of what Rio, and Brazil as a whole, have to offer. I hope to one day return to Rio with my girlfriend - if only to hear more of that entrancing bossa nova.