ExCAPE: Penn researchers will lead 5 yr, $10M project to program with talking computers

For those who don’t know how to code, programming languages can seem like intractable gibberish. For those who do, the programming required to solve a problem can be so complex that they feel the same way.

Researchers at Penn have just received a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help simplify the process of talking to computers to minimize programming errors. The project, which will be completed in partnership with a host of other schools, is called Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering — ExCAPE, for short, according to the press release.

The explicit goal of ExCAPE is to help minimize errors that occur when programmers must use complicated code to solve various problems. Currently, the most complex programs require verification teams to check the code for these errors. ExCAPE hopes to design a tool that allows the programmer to avoid such errors in the first place, according to release.

From the release:

“The researchers are proposing an integrated tool kit for automated program synthesis. Such a tool kit would allow a programmer to essentially collaborate with a computer on writing a program, contributing the parts they are most suited to. With more powerful and integrated verification systems, the computer would be able to give feedback to the programmer about errors in the program and even propose corrections.”

Penn computer and information science professor Rajeev Alur will lead the project with collaboration from Penn engineering professors, Milo Martin, Boon Thau Loo, George Pappas and Steve Zdancewic.

Other partners involved in the project include researchers from University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, Cornell University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and Rice University.

Ultimately, Alur said in the press release, the researchers hope to make computer programming more accessible, particularly to high school students, who might be able to use the tool kit to improve performance at more technical tasks, like solving tricky algebra problems.