Applications of Program Synthesis to End-User Programming and Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Computing devices have become widely available to billions of end users, yet a handful of experts have the needed expertise to program these devices. Automated program synthesis has the potential to revolutionize this landscape, when targeted for the right set of problems and when allowing the right interaction model. The first part of this talk discusses techniques for programming using examples and natural language. These techniques have been applied to various end-user programming domains including data manipulation and smartphone scripting. The second part of this talk presents surprising applications of program synthesis technology to automating various repetitive tasks in Education including problem, solution, and feedback generation for various subject domains such as math and programming. These results advance the state-of-the-art in intelligent tutoring, and can play a significant role in enabling personalized and interactive education in both standard classrooms and MOOCs.