Prof. Claire Le Goues
/ Automatic Program Repair Using Semantic Search
Abstract
Bugs in programs remain a pernicious problem. Research techniques in automated program improvement and repair are typically classified as either heuristic—searching over a set of syntactic changes, often drawn from an existing body of code—or semantic—leveraging symbolic analysis or synthesis to construct program-improving changes with respect to an inferred specification. In this talk, I will outline our recent advances in techniques that lie squarely in the middle, drawing on the best of both worlds: We reason about desired program behavior semantically, and use that characterization to scalably identify and adapt pre-existing code to fix bugs automatically. I will particularly emphasize the potential these approaches have to construct high quality patches, tackling a key outstanding challenge in the state-of-the-art in automated patching.
About the Speaker
Claire Le Goues is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests span software engineering and programming languages, and especially in how to maintain, evolve, improve/debug, and assure high-quality software systems. She is the 2020 recipient of the SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher award, recognizing her "groundbreaking work on automated program repair, impact on industrial practice, and service to the software engineering research community." Dr. Le Goues holds MS and PhD degrees from the University of Virginia and a BA from Harvard College, all in Computer Science.