COPLAS Talk: Prem Devanbu

COPENHAGEN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE SEMINAR (COPLAS) TALK:
by Professor Prem Devanbu, University of California at Davis.

Abstract:

Around 2011, at UC Davis, we discovered that Software corpora aren't merely non-original, they are also extremely repetitive, and amenable to statistical modeling. This discovery led to whole line of research, both trying to understand why this was so, and how to exploit this phenomenon. Applications to tasks such as code suggestion, defect detection, code de-obfuscation, and gradual typing quickly followed,
as well as the development of new kinds of statistical models, both traditional and deep-learning based, adapted for the vagaries of code; meanwhile we have also been trying to understand exactly WHY software is so repetitive. This is a hard question, but some recent results suggest that programmers' tendency to repetitiveness is quite intentional, and perhaps related to effort-reduction.

Bio:

Prem Devanbu received his B.Tech from IIT Madras, and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, is a CS Faculty as UC Davis. Prem has program-chaired ICSE (in 2010) and FSE (in 2006) and has been associate editor for ACM TOSEM, IEEE TSE, and ESE Journals. He has won 4 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished paper awards, best paper awards at ICSE NIER, ASE and MSR, the 10-year most-influential paper award at MSR 2016, and the Test of Time award at SIGSOFT ESEC/FSE 2018. Three of his papers appear in the CACM Research  Highlights, including one on the Naturalness work. He is an ACM Fellow.

Host: Fritz Henglein (DIKU, tel. +45-30589576)