Recent years have seen dramatic improvements in our ability to synthesize non-trivial functions. These advances have been made possible by a combination of new algorithms and increased computing power. Just as important as these, however, has been a new appreciation for how synthesis capabilities can be brought to bear on relevant and challenging problems, some of which do not even look like synthesis problems at first sight.

This talk will summarize the current state of the art in program synthesis and highlight some of the open problems in the field and some of the applications currently being explored. The talk will focus on the work of the Computer Aided Programming group at MIT, but will also highlight some of the key results from other groups that have made recent progress possible.

Armando Solar-Lezama is an associate professor at MIT where he leads the Computer Aided Programming Group. His research interests include software synthesis and its applications in diverse areas such as high-performance computing, information flow security and probabilistic programming.