Robotics expert is part of $10M automated programming project

Cornell robotics researcher Hadas Kress-Gazit is part of a five-year, $10 million National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing project to make computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive. Dubbed ExCAPE (Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering), the project is a collaborative effort led by the University of Pennsylvania that will involve multiple institutions, industry partners and educational outreach programs for the next generation of computer scientists. Cornell received $500,000 for the project. The researchers are developing an integrated toolkit for automated program synthesis. Instead of coding thousands of lines of explicit instructions "by hand," as programmers have done for decades in a time-consuming, expensive and error-prone process, they could use such a toolkit to essentially collaborate with a computer on writing programs. Using recent advances in computer science, the team aims to enable programmers to specify what the program should do, not how it should be done, and have the tools generate the code. "This is a really huge opportunity to improve how systems are programmed in general and start generating good code from the start," said Kress-Gazit, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and a principal investigator on the project.