Rise of the Robots: Next for DARPA? ‘Autocomplete’ for Programmers
Posted: February 15, 2015 Filed under: Mediasphere, Robotics, Science & Technology | Tags: American Anthropological Association, Animation, Anthropology, Michigan State University, Nervous system, Rebecca Blank, Scott Walker (politician), University of Wisconsin System, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin 3 Comments
Writing computer programs could become as easy as searching the Internet. A Rice University-led team of software experts has launched an $11 million effort to create a sophisticated tool called PLINY that will both “autocomplete” and “autocorrect” code for programmers, much like the software to complete search queries and correct spelling on today’s Web browsers and smartphones.
“The engine will formulate answers using Bayesian statistics. Much like today’s spell-correction algorithms, it will deliver the most probable solution first, but programmers will be able to cycle through possible solutions if the first answer is incorrect.”
— Chris Jermaine, associate professor of computer science at Rice
“Imagine the power of having all the code that has ever been written in the past available to programmers at their fingertips as they write new code or fix old code,” said Vivek Sarkar, Rice’s E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, chair of the Department of Computer Science and the principal investigator (PI) on the PLINY project. “You can think of this as autocomplete for code, but in a far more sophisticated way.”
Sarkar said the four-year effort is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). PLINY, which draws its name from the Roman naturalist who authored the first encyclopedia, will involve more than two dozen computer scientists from Rice, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the company GrammaTech.
“Imagine the power of having all the code that has ever been written in the past available to programmers at their fingertips as they write new code or fix old code. You can think of this as autocomplete for code, but in a far more sophisticated way.”
— Vivek Sarkar, Rice’s E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering
PLINY is part of DARPA’s Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE) program, an initiative that seeks to gather hundreds of billions of lines of publicly available open-source computer code and to mine that code to create a searchable database of properties, behaviors and vulnerabilities.
Rice team members say the effort will represent a significant advance in the way software is created, verified and debugged.
“Software today is far more complex than it was 20 years ago, yet it is still largely created by hand, one line of code at a time. We envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears. And not only that, the rest of the code should work seamlessly with the code that’s already been written.”
— Swarat Chaudhuri, assistant professor of computer science at Rice
He said PLINY will need to be sophisticated enough to recognize and match similar patterns regardless of differences in programming languages and code specifications. Read the rest of this entry »
TRIGGER WARNING! University of Michigan Student Writer Suspended by Campus Newspaper for Satirical Column
Posted: November 25, 2014 Filed under: Education, Humor, Mediasphere | Tags: Academia, Academic integrity, Affirmative Action, Ann Arbor, Anno Domini, Athletic director, BAMN, East Lansing, Michigan, Michigan State University, Michigan Wolverines, The Michigan Daily, University of Michigan 1 Comment
The column was offensive to progressives so obviously, the student needed to be punished.
Read it below, courtesy of the College Fix.
Read the ‘hostile’ column that got student writer suspended by campus newspaper
Editor’s note: Below is a satirical column penned by University of Michigan student Omar Mahmood, who writes for both the mainstream campus newspaper The Michigan Daily and the conservative independent publication the Michigan Review. Or at least he did.
After his column was published last week, Mahmood tells The College Fix: “I received a call from the editorial editor [of the Daily] telling me that I had created a ‘hostile environment’ among the editorial staff and that someone had felt threatened because of what I had written … The issue had been taken to the editor in chief who procured a bylaw by which I was given an ultimatum to leave the Review or leave the Daily within a week. I was not allowed to know the name of the offended individuals.” He added the newspaper’s leaders are “forcing me to write a letter of apology as a condition for staying on the Daily” and suspended his regular column in the Daily.
Mahmood has written for both the Review and the Daily concurrently for this fall semester, but after this controversial column was published the Daily’s editors decided “Mr. Mahmood’s involvement with the Michigan Review presents a conflict of interest. Our bylaws say that once a determination is made that a conflict of interest exists, the person in question will have one week to resign from either the Daily or the organization causing the conflict of interest,” according to a statement from the Daily to The College Fix.
Without further ado, we present to you “Do The Left Thing” by Omar Mahmood:
TRIGGER WARNING! Read the rest of this entry »
pundit from another planet 