Assistant Professor of Computer Science Elizabeth Dinella has received the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT).
SIGSOFT seeks to improve the ability to engineer software by stimulating interaction among practitioners, researchers, and educators; by fostering the professional development of software engineers; and by representing software engineers to professional, legal, and political entities. SIGSOFT's Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award is presented annually to the author of an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of Software Engineering.
Dinella's notable dissertation explores the idea that neural inference of specifications can overcome fundamental roadblocks in automated program reasoning. In an ideal development setting, programmers could leverage automated tools that efficiently predict program behavior, identifying potential bugs, security vulnerabilities, and readability issues. Decades of research in program reasoning yielded many fruitful techniques grounded in rules and formal logic.
"I’m honored to receive this award. As software becomes increasingly pervasive in society, ensuring its correctness and safety is more important than ever. I am excited to continue this work at Bryn Mawr's AI4SE (AI for Software Engineering) lab. By leveraging the advances in Artificial Intelligence, we can help software developers build safer, more reliable systems."
However, significant barriers exist to achieving fully automated effective program reasoning tooling. Many techniques require a correctness property to check against. Additionally, many techniques struggle to scale in the presence of constructs widely seen in real-world programs. By applying statistical techniques to a variety of program reasoning tasks including static bug finding, merge conflict resolution, and automated testing, this dissertation demonstrates the promise of deep learning based specification inference and its implications in downstream program reasoning tasks.
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