[CMU AI Seminar] March 15 at 12pm (Zoom) -- Kevin Ellis (Cornell) -- What Program Synthesis Can Learn From How People Write Code -- AI Seminar sponsored by Morgan Stanley

[Asher Trockman]

Dear all,

We look forward to seeing you *tomorrow, this Tuesday (3/15)* from
*1**2:00-1:00
PM (U.S. Eastern time)* for the next talk of our *CMU AI seminar*,
sponsored by Morgan Stanley
<https://www.morganstanley.com/about-us/technology/>.

To learn more about the seminar series or see the future schedule, please
visit the seminar website <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aiseminar/>.

*Tomorrow* (3/15), *Kevin Ellis *(Cornell) will be giving a talk
titled *"**What
Program Synthesis Can Learn From How People Write Code**" *to share his
work on advancing program synthesis using insights from how humans build
software, such as writing libraries and using REPLs.

*Title*: What Program Synthesis Can Learn From How People Write Code

*Talk Abstract*: How can we best make systems which learn to write computer
programs? Here I explore the idea that we should take insight from the
techniques and tools that human coders use when building software, but that
we should combine those insights with machine learning methods. I focus on
two basic coding techniques: writing libraries, and using interpreters
("REPLs"). For libraries, I present a system called DreamCoder, which grows
a library of reusable subroutines as it solves a range of programming
problems. DreamCoder's architecture builds on the structure of wake-sleep
neural network training algorithms, and combines both symbolic and neural
learning. For interpreters, I present a system which learns to interact
with a REPL while it writes code, showing that this can help mitigate the
combinatorial search difficulties of program synthesis. At the end of the
talk, I will present preliminary results on modeling another aspect of
coding: creating challenging and interesting programming problems.

*Speaker Bio*: Kevin Ellis <https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ellisk/> works in
artificial intelligence and programming languages. He is an assistant
professor of computer science at Cornell University, and was previously a
research scientist at Common Sense Machines. He did his PhD at MIT in
cognitive science.

*Zoom Link*:
https://cmu.zoom.us/j/99510233317?pwd=ZGx4aExNZ1FNaGY4SHI3Qlh0YjNWUT09

Thanks,
Asher Trockman
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