$10 million NSF Grant for Code Automation by nine universities and institutions

I found this news at HPC Wire. It sounds like an ambitious project but why don’t ? Really curious about how smart the developed tools will be. If it is successful, $10 million is quite cheap.

HOUSTON, TX, April 3 — Computer scientists from Rice University, the University of Pennsylvania and seven other institutions are teaming up to address one of the greatest ironies of the information age: While computers and robots have automated the manufacture of thousands of products, the software that allows them to do this is still written mostly by hand.

Armed with a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers hope to create intelligent software agents — smart programs that can first observe and learn from human programmers and then help humans write code faster and with fewer errors. Based at Penn, the five-year effort is dubbed Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering, or ExCAPE. It is funded by the NSF’s Expeditions in Computing program, which supports ambitious research agendas that will define the future of computing.

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