Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Roopsha Samanta (Purdue University) - Semantics-Guided Inductive Program Synthesis

Speaker: Roopsha Samanta, Purdue University

Talk Title: Semantics-Guided Inductive Program Synthesis

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: The dream of program synthesis seeks to automatically develop programs that conform to a user's intent. Classically, program synthesis has been framed as a problem of generation of correct-by-construction programs from complete, formal specifications of their expected behavior. An increasingly promising and more tractable paradigm of program synthesis, however, is inductive program synthesis. Broadly construed, inductive program synthesis can be framed as a problem of program discovery from partial specifications such as input-output examples, program traces, and natural language descriptions. While the last decade has witnessed several breakthroughs in improving the scalability and applicability of inductive program synthesis, the true potential of this synthesis paradigm remains to be unleashed.

In this talk, I will describe my group's ongoing endeavors to advance the frontiers of inductive program synthesis. Further, I will emphasize the need to tackle a fundamental, yet often neglected, challenge of inductive synthesis-”reliability. Because inductive synthesizers generalize from partial observations, they often suffer from overfitting, ambiguity, and brittleness-”the synthesized program may indeed conform to its partial specification, but it may not exhibit the intended behavior on all inputs. I will present my group's novel semantics-guided approach-”based on surprising notions of program semantics-”to improve the reliability of inductive program synthesis.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium


Biography: Roopsha Samanta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. Before joining Purdue in 2016, she completed her PhD at UT Austin in 2013, advised by E. Allen Emerson and Vijay K. Garg, and was a postdoctoral researcher at IST Austria from 2014-2016 with Thomas A. Henzinger. She is a recipient of 2019 NSF CAREER award and 2021 Amazon Research Award. Roopsha's research seeks to help programmers write programs that conform to their intent. She develop tools and techniques for algorithmic program verification, synthesis, and repair for a spectrum of application domains, correctness specifications, and programmer expertise. Her current research agenda is centered around two themes-”semantics-guided inductive program synthesis and repair and modular, bounded verification of unbounded distributed systems

Host: Mukund Raghothaman

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 105

Audiences: By invitation only.

Contact: Assistant to CS chair