Welcome Back Colloquium!

Friday, September 7th @ 2:35pm, TCL 202

Find out what’s in store for this semester, nominate CoSSAC members, and hear a talk by Claire Le Goues of Carnegie Mellon University. Colloquium credit and snacks offered.

“Fixed That For You: Scalable Semantic Code Search for High-Quality Program Repair”

Developers spend an amazing amount of time finding and fixing bugs in their programs. There’s been great progress in tooling, compiler and IDE extensions, linters, and other increasingly expressive tools to automatically find bugs before (and after) code ships.

But what about automatically fixing them?

In this talk I will overview recent advances in software engineering and programming languages research that aims to bring that dream to reality, using everything from metaheuristic search to program synthesis to machine learning and search over big databases of existing code to make it happen. I will outline our recent advances in techniques that draw on the best of both metaheuristic search and program analysis by reasoning about desired program behavior semantically, and using that characterization to scalably identify and adapt pre-existing code to fix bugs automatically.

Claire Le Goues is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2013. Her research interests span software engineering and programming languages, focusing especially on how to automatically and confidently evolve, debug, and improve real-world software systems. She also directs CMU’s undergraduate programs in Software Engineering, and is passionate about the education and training of both software engineering practitioners and researchers, from all backgrounds and walks of life.