Seminar by Sumit Gulwani
Programming by Examples and Natural Language
Sumit Gulwani
Microsoft Research, Redmond
Date: Tuesday, February 11th, 2014
Time: 5:00 PM
Venue: CS102.Abstract:
Computing devices have become widely available to billions of end-users, yet a handful of experts have the needed expertise to program these devices. Automated program synthesis has the potential to revolutionize this landscape, when targeted for the right set of problems and when allowing the right interaction model. In this talk, I will describe some recent advances in program synthesis techniques that enable programming using examples and natural language. I will illustrate these techniques using various application domains including tricky bitvector algorithms, spreadsheet data manipulation, and smartphone scripts.
About the speaker:
Sumit Gulwani is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and an adjunct faculty in the Computer Science Department at IIT Kanpur. He has expertise in formal methods and automated program analysis and synthesis techniques. As part of his vision to empower masses, he has recently focused on cross-disciplinary areas of automating end-user programming (for various systems like spreadsheets, smartphones, and robots), and building intelligent tutoring systems (for various subject domains including programming, logic, and math). Sumit's programming-by-example work led to the famous Flash Fill feature of Microsoft Excel 2013 that is used by hundreds of millions of people. Sumit obtained his PhD in Computer Science from UC-Berkeley in 2005, and was awarded 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.