The paper “SemFix: Program Repair via Semantic Analysis” written a decade ago, suggested the use of symbolic program analysis techniques to automatically repair code. Conceptually this work gave a new direction to use symbolic execution for specification inference. These techniques are useful for security vulnerability repair, intelligent tutoring for teaching of programming, and for improvement of automatically generated code, which is becoming increasingly relevant.

Abhik Roychoudhury is a Provost’s Chair Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. Abhik’s research focuses on software testing and analysis and software security. He was awarded the IEEE TCSE New Directions Award for contributions to symbolic execution, and was also involved in setting up Singapore Cybersecurity Consortium for industry-academia collaboration.

Satish Chandra is a researcher at Google, where he applies machine learning to improve developer productivity. The projects he has led have had significant industrial impact: such as his work at Meta on ML-inspired techniques for automated bug fixing and code search.