Communications of the ACM
Programming Computers to Help Computer Programmers
Rice University professor Lydia Kavraki
Credit: Rice University
Computer scientists from Rice University will participate in a project to create intelligent software agents that help people write code faster and with fewer errors.
The Rice team will focus on robotic applications and how to verify that synthetic, computer-generated code is safe and effective, as part of the effort to develop automated program-synthesis tools for a variety of uses.
"Programming is now done by experts only, and this needs to change if we are to use robots as helpers for humans," says Rice professor Lydia Kavraki. She also stresses that safety is critical. "You can only have robots help humans in a task--any task, whether mundane, dangerous, precise, or expensive--if you can guarantee that the behavior of the robot is going to be the expected one."
The U.S. National Science Foundation is providing a $10 million grant to fund the five-year initiative, which is based at the University of Pennsylvania.
Computer scientists at Rice and Penn have proposed a grand challenge robotic scenario of providing hospital staff with an automated program-synthesis tool for programming mobile robots to go from room to room, turn off lights, distribute medications, and remove medical waste.
From Rice University
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