Program Synthesis is an area of Programming Languages concerned with automatically generating programs from high-level and possibly incomplete descriptions, such as input-output examples, logical formulas, and even natural language. Program Synthesis today is a very diverse and vibrant research area, and the goal of this talk is to give you a taste of this diversity by introducing a handful of Big Ideas, which shaped the area and influenced my own research.

Nadia Polikarpova is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She received her PhD from ETH Zurich (Switzerland), and spent a couple of years as a postdoc at MIT CSAIL. She is a 2020 Sloan Fellow and a recipient of 2020 Intel Rising Stars Award and the 2020 NSF Career Award. Her research interests are in program synthesis, program verification, and type systems.