Prof. Ruzica Piskac receives NSF CAREER award

February 10, 2016

Ruzica Piskac, an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer Science, has received a NSF CAREER award for her proposal, “Synthesis in a Live Programming Environment”. The CAREER award is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Piskac’s research interests span the areas of programming languages, software verification, automated reasoning, and code synthesis. In her CAREER award she proposed the concept of cooperative programming which combines a live programming environment and the programming by example paradigm. Under this grant she will work on devising novel real-time algorithms to synthesize code, investigating new fault localization techniques, and developing code repair that is intuitive and natural for the user. These ideas will be evaluated in a modern, major programming language, thus making it readily accessible to programmers. In this way, the broader impact of cooperative programming is to increase programmer productivity while simultaneously lowering the barriers to entry for novice programmers, such as secondary school students.