Programming Language Processing : How AI can Revolutionize Software Development?

Abstract

The past decade has seen unprecedented growth in Software Engineering— developers spend enormous time and effort to create new products. With such enormous growth comes the responsibility of producing and maintaining quality and robust software. However, developing such software is non-trivial— 50% of software developers’ valuable time is wasted on finding and fixing bugs, costing the global economy around USD$1.1 trillion. Today, I will discuss how AI can help in different stages of the software development life cycle for developing quality products. In particular, I will talk about Programming Language Processing (PLP), an emerging research field that can model different aspects of code (source, binary, execution, etc.) to automate diverse Software Engineering tasks, including code generation, bug finding, security analysis, etc.