Sumit Gulwani
Microsoft Research, Redmond.
Date: Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Time: 5 PM
Venue: CS101.
Recent research in program synthesis has made it possible to effectively synthesize small programs in a variety of domains. In this talk, I will describe two useful applications of this technology that have the potential to influence daily lives of billions of people. One application involves automating end-user programming using examples or keywords, which can allow non-programmers to effectively use computational devices such as computers, smartphones (and in the future robots) to perform a variety of repetitive tasks. Another application involves building intelligent tutoring systems that can help teachers and students with a variety of educational activities such as synthesizing problems, hints, solutions in various domains including math, science, and programming.
Sumit Gulwani is a researcher in the RiSE group at Microsoft Research. His research interests are in the areas of /automated program synthesis/ (with applications in end-user programming, automated teaching, discovery of new algorithms, and reduction of programming burden for regular programmers) and /quantitative program analysis/ (including symbolic computational complexity analysis, resource bound analysis, analysis of uncertain/approximate computation). His work has drawn on techniques from formal verification (logic, theorem proving, and model checking), randomized algorithms, and machine learning. Sumit obtained his Phd in Computer Science from UC-Berkeley in 2005, and was awarded the C.V. Ramamoorthy Award (given for "outstanding contributions to a new research area in Computer Science") and the ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. He obtained his BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 2000, and was awarded the President's Gold Medal.