Armando Solar-Lezama

Armando Solar-Lezama is a Distinguished Professor of Computing in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). He is the associate director and COO in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he leads the Computer Assisted Programming Group. Solar-Lezama and his research group focus on program synthesis, a research area at the intersection of programming systems and artificial intelligence. On the one hand, program synthesis is about the use of automated reasoning and learning to bring more automation to the programming process. On the other hand, code provides a uniquely versatile modeling mechanism, so program synthesis can play a powerful role in helping to build learning systems that are more predictable and robust. Solar-Lezama earned a PhD from University of California, Berkeley.

Selected Publications

• Fulton, N., Hunt, N., Das, S., Magliacane, S., Hoang, T. N., Solar-Lezama, A. (2021). Verifiably Safe Exploration for End-to-End Reinforcement Learning. ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC).
• Ellis, K., Nye, M., Sablé-Meyer, M., Morales, L., Hewitt, L. B., Solar-Lezama, A., Tenenbaum, J., Wong, C., Cary, L. (2021). DreamCoder: Bootstrapping Inductive Program Synthesis with Wake-sleep Library Learning. ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI).
• Alet, F., Lopez-Contreras, J., Koppel, J., Nye, M., Solar-Lezama, A., Lozano-Perez, T., Kaelbling, L., Tenenbaum, J. (2021). A large-scale benchmark for few-shot program induction and synthesis. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

Media

• March 24, 2020: CSAIL News, Armando Solar-Lezama wins NSF Expeditions Grant.
• June 14, 2019: MIT News, Toward artificial intelligence that learns to write code.
• May 25, 2017: MIT News, Armando Solar-Lezama: Academic success despite an inauspicious start.