My POPL 2011 “Flash Fill” paper was the most important turning point in my research career. I went from searching for the hardest problem I can solve to searching for the simplest problem that will have the most impact. It sensitized me to customer connection and enlightened me to how practical requirements can inspire foundational research ideas and directions. And most of all, it led to a blissful connection with my loved ones.
Everyone uses math libraries. Surprisingly, mainstream math libraries do not produce correct results for several thousands of inputs. Developers are seldom aware of them, which affects reproducibility and portability. We describe our new method for synthesizing elementary functions that produces correct results for all inputs but is also significantly faster than the state of the art libraries, which have been optimized for decades.
Modern analog computers offer unique programming challenges which make them challenging compilation targets. How do we automatically program an analog computer to implement a computation?
The demand for data science and data scientists is growing fast, and so is corresponding size and scope of the the problem. PL technology, notably program synthesis, can help.
The authors of POPL’s 2020 most influential paper reflect on the journey that produced their award winning research on program synthesis, and the impact the work has had on them, the research community, and society at large, ever since.
