[pl-seminar] FW: Full-time/postdoc/internship opportunity at Microsoft for Program Synthesis research (PL and/or ML background)

[Thomas Reps <reps@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

fyi

 

From: Sumit Gulwani [mailto:sumitg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2017 3:49 PM
To: Sumit Gulwani <sumitg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Full-time/postdoc/internship opportunity at Microsoft for Program Synthesis research (PL and/or ML background)

 

Dear colleagues: Can you please help advertise the following full-time/postdoc position at your department. [On a different note, please also encourage your students to apply for related internship positions.]

Thanks,

Sumit

 

Researcher job description:

The PROSE research and engineering team (https://microsoft.github.io/prose/) develops APIs for program synthesis (programming-by-examples and programming-by-natural-language) for many task domains. These APIs ship within multiple Microsoft products including Excel (Flash Fill), Powershell (ConvertFrom-string and Convert-string cmdlet), and OMS (Custom Field feature), and are set to change the user experience in fundamental ways for many more. See this 5-minute video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-k9WjRJvIY) for a short demo.

Program synthesis is a new frontier in AI wherein the computer programs itself---the user provides input-output examples and the computer synthesizes an intended script. This is significant because 99% people who own computers do not know programming. Even for programmers, this can provide a 10-100x productivity increase for many task domains, and especially in the areas of data wrangling/preparation and code refactoring. The former is very useful for data scientists who end up spending 80% of their time wrangling data.

Our team has developed a framework to facilitate development of individual program synthesis technologies---one of our long-term goals is to enable any developer (without program synthesis research background) to develop a by-example experience for their product. This framework leverages both logical reasoning techniques and machine learning techniques (and combines them in unique ways) for doing program search and for resolving ambiguity in the example-based specifications. Our framework also supports development of APIs for rich interactivity and debuggability.

The researcher will perform both research and engineering including development of new algorithms and their robust implementations. The researcher will lead design and development of some novel aspects of the framework working closely with other team members. The researcher will also lead the design and development of some individual PBE technologies that will be developed on top of this framework.

Qualifications:

1. Phd in Computer Science. Specialization in the area of Programming Languages or Formal Methods or Machine Learning.
2. Background/expertise in Program Synthesis (programming-by-examples or programming-by-natural-language) highly preferred. 
3. 5 years of experience with software development, preferably C# (or Java)
4. Must be able to work closely with other researchers and engineers in the team.

 

Contact:

Sumit Gulwani

sumitg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/sumitg/