<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><h1 class="page__title title" id="page-title">Program Synthesis for the Masses</h1><span class="event-speaker">
<a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/rishabh/website/">Rishabh Singh</a> </span>
<span class="event-speaker-from">
(<a href="http://web.mit.edu/">Massachusetts Institute of Technology</a>)
</span><p>Tuesday, February 25, 4:30pm</p><p>Computer Science 105<br></p><p><br></p><p>New computing platforms have greatly increased the demand for
programmers, but learning to program remains a big challenge. Program
synthesis has the potential to revolutionize programming by making it
more accessible. My work has focused on two goals: making programming
more intuitive through the use of new interfaces, and using automated
feedback to help students learn programming. In this talk, I will
present my work on three systems that work towards these goals. The
FlashFill system helps end-users perform repetitive data transformations
over strings, numbers, and tables using input-output examples.
FlashFill was shipped as part of Excel 2013 and was quoted as one of the
top features by many press reviews. The Storyboard Programming system
helps students write data-structure manipulations using textbook-like
visual examples and bridges the gap between high-level insights and
low-level code. Finally, the Autograder system provides automated
feedback to students on introductory programming assignments, and was
successfully run on tens of thousands of programming exercises from edX.
I will describe how ideas from advances in constraint-solving, machine
learning, and formal verification enabled the new forms of interaction
required by these systems.</p><p><br></p>
<p>Rishabh Singh is a PhD candidate in the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. His research interests are
broadly in formal methods and programming languages. His PhD work
focuses on developing program synthesis techniques for making
programming accessible to end-users and students. He is a Microsoft
Research PhD fellow and winner of MIT's William A. Martin Outstanding
Master's thesis Award. He obtained his BTech in Computer Science and
Engineering from IIT Kharagpur in 2008, where he was awarded the
Institute Silver Medal and Bigyan Sinha Memorial Award. He was also
awarded to be Prime Minister's National Guest at Republic Day Parade,
New Delhi in 2005.</p></div></div></blockquote></body></html>