Discussion between John Hawkins and Rohitash Chandra

AI Agents are quickly emerging as one of the most impactful developments in computer science this century. Coding agents allow programmers to massively shorten the time required to build prototypes, find software bugs and eliminate the need for manually coding significant parts of the application stack. In this discussion, we will talk about this technology, how it works, how to use it and how it is re-shaping work. We will initially focus on the impact for software engineers and data scientists, but then expand to talk about what comes next, what other kinds of work can be impacted and how we all prepare as our work is re-shaped by this technology.

The conversation is available to view on YouTube


Dr John Hawkins is an Australian data scientist and the author of the books Getting Data Science Done and Data Science First: Using Language Models in AI-Enabled Applications1. He is the chief scientist for Ad Tech company Playground XYZ, the research director at Pingla Institute, and an affiliate researcher with the Transitional AI Group at UNSW. He has more than twenty years of experience in solving problems in industry and academia, delivering data science solutions for organisations in software development, banking, insurance, media, ad-tech, and bio-medical research.

1John launched his new book at the UNSW bookstore on May 6, 2026.


Rohitash Chandra is an Associate Professor in Data Science at the UNSW Sydney. He is the director of the Transitional AI Research Group at UNSW, and the chairman of the Pingla Institute. He leads a research program that encircles various methodologies and applications of artificial intelligence. These methodologies encompass Bayesian deep learning ensemble learning, and data augmentation, with applications in large language models, climate extremes, geoscientific models, mineral exploration, remote sensing and geocoastal modelling. His work with large language models is dedicated to machine translation, media, and humanities. He has pioneered the area of language models for studying ancient religious-philosophical texts.