Sankha Guria

My research advances the science of program synthesis to meet the challenges posed by the use of modern general-purpose languages, tools, and frameworks. In this talk, I will present a vision for an automated programming stack that uses specifications and expressive test cases written by programmers to scale synthesis tools to diverse domains. Specifically, I show that types enriched with effect descriptors inferred from test cases are a potent means to guide the synthesis of real Ruby on Rails web apps or types enriched with logical predicates can be used to synthesize verified privacy preserving queries. The key to both projects, and most other successful synthesis work, is the proper choice of abstraction for the problem domain at hand. Based on this insight, I will describe a new synthesis framework that captures many different synthesis approaches from the literature, making it easier to build the synthesis tools of the future. Finally, I will present a vision for an automated programming stack that uses specifications and expressive test cases written by programmers to scale synthesis tools to diverse domains, moving us closer to a world in which correct programs are constructed automatically from a programmer's intent.