Software engineers never start from a blank page, but rather from an extant and usually long-running project in need of modification (for repair, extension, update, etc.). One way to view modern programming is thus as a continual process of iteratively transforming existing programs into something new, and hopefully better. In this context, I will talk about the development of the area of automatic program repair, from research novelty to industrial deployment. I will discuss the potential that this class of automatic program transformation approaches has to augment or automate a broad range of software development activities. I will focus especially on the fundamental challenge of ensuring that automatically transformed code is of acceptable quality, and ways to tackle that challenge, especially in light of recent advances in generative AI. Finally, I will reflect on the implications these emerging techniques have for the ways human engineers interact with their toolchains and their software systems, as well as for analysis and tool designers.

Bio: Claire Le Goues is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, primarily affiliated with the Software and Societal Systems Department. Her expertise lies in software engineering and applied programming languages, and especially in techniques for improving software quality via automatic program analysis and transformation. She is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE), the ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award, and an NSF CAREER Award, as well as faculty awards from Google and Meta; her early work on program repair has received impact awards from SIGEVO, ICSE, and IEEE TSE; and her research has been recognized by Distinguished Paper designations from ICSE, GECCO, and USENIX Security. In addition to teaching classes at all levels in software engineering and program analysis, Le Goues is a proud co-founder and co-director of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Software Engineering (REUSE) program (reuse.cs.cmu.edu). Le Goues received MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, and a BA in the same from Harvard College. More details are available at: www.clairelegoues.com.