VSS25: Introduction to Program Synthesis – DRAFT

Wednesday 13th August, Morning Session

Talk by Elizabeth Polgreen, The University of Edinburgh


BACKGROUND:

Writing code is boring, so what if we could automate that? Program synthesis is a term used to refer to automatically generating code that satisfies a given specification. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss the state of the art techniques in this field, which sits at the intersection of formal methods, programming languages and machine learning.

PREPARATION:

Dr Sebastian Ullrich headshot

Elizabeth Polgreen

I am a lecturer  in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I am interested in formal program synthesis techniques and the use of synthesis to increase the scalability of verification. I hold a research fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral research scholar in Professor Sanjit Seshia’s group at the University of California, Berkeley. I completed my PhD at the University of Oxford, supervised by Professor Alessandro Abate.