PROSE

Hello there, I am Shashank Kirtania. I joined the PROSE team as a Research Fellow, where I’ll be contributing to the VS Copilot team. I recently completed my degree in Computer Engineering from Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology. My professional interests are rooted in machine learning and using machine learning to decipher complex modalities. Beyond computer science, I am interested in art and history.

I am a research fellow in the Microsoft PROSE team. I am a senior undergraduate at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, majoring in electrical engineering and computer science & engineering. I am interested in programming languages, software engineering, and computer systems. Currently, I am working with the BluePencil team, creating AI experiences for developers using program synthesis. Besides computer science, I am also excited about linguistics and economics. At leisure, I like listening to music (I am a vocalist, myself). Moreover, I like binge-watching TV series and movies, and following up with world affairs.

I have recently graduated as a computer science and design engineer from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIITD), India. I have joined the PROSE team as a research fellow, and will be working on AI for programming education. I am passionate about HCI and the design of interactive and accessible systems, and am currently exploring program analysis. In my spare time, I enjoy swimming, baking, and learning photography.

I recently completed my BTech in computer science at PES University, Bangalore (2022). My interests in computers mainly revolve around deep learning. Being a part of the team at Microsoft PROSE as a research fellow, I am working on a project involving program repair of formulas for Excel and PowerApps. Prior to this, I was an intern at Microsoft Research (MSR) working on using graph neural networks to improve code-reviewer recommendations in large code repositories. I love playing sports – especially football, cricket and foosball. Other than that, I enjoy most food and love reading.

I am Priyanshu, a recent computer science graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. I have joined the PROSE Team as a research fellow. My research interests lie in machine learning and programming languages. Besides computer science, I enjoy reading about biology, ancient history and anthropology.

I recently completed my degree in CS from VIT Vellore. I will work on improving Power Automate as a research fellow at PROSE. Before joining PROSE, I spent my time writing code for Prodigal, a cool start-up revolutionizing debt collection. My passion for Tech, Education, and Edtech during school inspired me to work on Edtech research at CMU and tackle Educational inequity with Wave Learning Festival. Outside of work, I love running, lifting, and watching movies.

Michael is a 4th year PhD student at UC San Diego. He works on program synthesizers and how people use them. He has worked on a program synthesizer for the Haskell programming language. He has run user studies to understand how programmers understand and interact with code from program synthesizers. His research goal is to make synthesizers more accessible and easier to use. Outside of his research, you can find him on his bike or in the ceramics studio.

I have recently completed my bachelor’s from the University of Delhi, India. Previously, I was interning and then working full time with a German startup on entity resolution and master data management. My academic and professional interest ranges from applications of deep learning in healthcare to societal computing, intending to improve “ease-of-working” for millions. I am a football nerd and wouldn’t mind discussing the failing tactics of Barcelona in length over Asian food. Like most engineers, I heavily rely on caffeine and enjoy tea over the mountains while adoring the sunset.

Hi! I am Avishree Khare. I recently joined the PROSE team as a research fellow and would be working on employing ML for code edits. Prior to this, I was a Software Engineer at Google India where I worked on Capacity Planning for Cloud Storage. Last year, I graduated from BITS Pilani Goa campus with a degree in Computer Science. I am interested in everything Computer Science and am truly very excited to delve deeper into Program Synthesis and its applications! My other interests include running, teaching, and occasionally, writing.

I have completed my Bachelor’s in Information Technology from VJTI, Mumbai. My interests lie in building robust machine learning systems and formal methods. I have joined the PROSE team as a research fellow and will be working on improving user experience using program synthesis in the Data Wrangler effort. Before this, I was working with the AI meets Program Synthesis group at Microsoft Research, India on heterogeneous data extraction tasks. Besides computer science, I love playing the guitar and practicing mixed martial arts.

I have completed my undergraduate studies at National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, India, in electronics and communications engineering. I am interested in programming languages, learned embedding for code, and the HCI aspect of programming. I am very excited to work in the AI for programming education project. We are currently working on building intelligent and personalized tutoring tools to help teach programming better. Apart from this, I am an avid RC hobbyist and I love to travel.

I am Siba Smarak Panigrahi, a final-year undergraduate at the department of computer science and engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. I am from Odisha, a state in eastern India. I have joined the PROSE Team as a research fellow. Before joining, I have worked on projects involving pre-trained language models across various NLP tasks and bias in computer vision. At a high level, I am always curious about explainable and interpretable ML/AI. Further, I am a chess enthusiast and regularly write small fictions spanning different genres.

I am Rajaswa, a Research Fellow at the PROSE team. Currently, I am working on the Blue-Pencil project, which focuses on developing assistive modeless program synthesis systems. My research interests lie in Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, and Formal Languages. I have completed my bachelors degree in Electrical & Electronics engineering from BITS Pilani (Goa Campus), India. Besides my professional research interests, I also love to spend time reading books, hitting the gym, and participating in education efforts for technology. I am also occasionally curious about behavioral science, economics, and anthropology.

I am Het Shah, a recent computer science undergraduate from BITS Pilani, Goa, India. I have joined the PROSE team as a research fellow to explore program synthesis. Previously, I worked as a research intern at Microsoft Research, India. My research goal is to look at various ways to represent data efficiently. Outside of research, I love to play video games, binge shows, and visit and learn about new places and cultures.

I am a third year PhD student at North Carolina State University, advised by Thomas Price in the HINTS lab. My research stands on the intersection of computing education and programming language analysis. I have been working towards building data-driven methods for representing student programming code to enhance the ability of intelligent tutoring systems and benefit the student modeling process.

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, School of Information. My research focuses on the use of human and machine intelligence to improve introductory data science education. Prior to this, I worked at IBM Research Labs, India, and graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 2017, with a Master’s + Bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computing. In my spare time, I love to dance, listen to music and travel.

I am Ananya Singha, a recent graduate from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal with a major in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a minor in Data Science. I have joined the Microsoft PROSE Team as a research fellow and will be working on enhancing the user experience on PowerApps and Excel. My interest lies in deep learning and the interaction of humans with machine models. I have previously worked in fairness in CV, Graph Neural Network, and Natural Language Processing. As for my hobbies, I like painting, learning new musical instruments to play, and listening to music.

I am a final-year undergraduate at the computer science department, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India, and have joined the PROSE team as a research fellow. I am interested in machine learning and programming languages and believe that the intersection of AI and programming can allow people to perform sophisticated tasks without specialized software development knowledge. I like participating in volunteer activities especially teaching underprivileged kids. I have been associated with a few NGOs and like spending my time planning different activities for them. Apart from this I am an avid reader and love playing video games.

I am a final year undergraduate, at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and am majoring in computer science and engineering. I have joined the PROSE team as a research fellow. My research interests lie in the area of deep learning and programming languages, and I have previously worked in the area of extreme classification. Furthermore, I like to watch anime and TV series in my leisure time. I am also an avid reader and my favorite genres include science fiction, crime thrillers, and finance.

I am a second-year PhD student working on the intersection of human-computer interaction and program synthesis, advised by Dr. Elena Glassman from Harvard. Fun fact: this is my fifth “first day” at Microsoft. Almost every time I get a Microsoft labeled bottle, but remote work prevented it this time.

I am a rising sixth-year CS PhD student at Yale University, advised by Prof. Ruzica Piskac. I received my B.S. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (IEEE Honor Class), advised by Prof. Xinbing Wang. My research interests are program analysis, automatic debugging, and ML-based software engineering. Currently I am focusing on automated program repair. Previously, I worked on detecting misconfigurations in systems. In my leisure time, I spent most of my time playing table tennis. I was a professional table tennis player before, and I am looking forward to playing with you someday.

I am a third-year PhD student in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I am now doing research at madPL group, supervised by Loris D’Antoni and Aws Albarghouthi. I received my B.S. in computer science at Peking University (PKU) in 2019, supervised by Yingfei Xiong. My main research interest is software engineering and programming languages, especially program analysis and program synthesis. One goal of my research is to develop formal methods for trustworthy deep learning. Specifically, I am interested in developing formal methods to certify and improve the robustness of neural networks and verify the correctness of deep learning software. I am also interested in combining program synthesis and deep learning to generate programs in an interpretable and certifiable way.

I am a research fellow in the Microsoft PROSE team. I am a senior undergraduate at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, majoring in electrical engineering and computer science & engineering. I am interested in programming languages, software engineering, and computer systems. Currently, I am working with the BluePencil team, creating AI experiences for developers using program synthesis. Besides computer science, I am also excited about linguistics and economics. At leisure, I like listening to music (I am a vocalist, myself). Moreover, I like binge-watching TV series and movies, and following up with world affairs.

I am Rohan Bavishi, a 4th year PhD candidate at UC Berkeley advised by Koushik Sen. My research has focused on building synthesis-powered productivity tools for data-scientists, providing automation of key tasks such as data-prep or table-transformations and data visualization, given simple and easy-to-provide queries or specifications from the user. These tools leverage state-of-the-art machine learning models such as graph neural networks and use advanced code mining techniques to harness the power of open-source repositories of code. Beyond research, I enjoy playing the piano, reading non-fiction, designing video games, and cooking.

I am Priyanshu, a recent computer science graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. I have joined the PROSE Team as a research fellow. My research interests lie in machine learning and programming languages. Besides computer science, I enjoy reading about biology, ancient history and anthropology.

I have recently completed my bachelor’s from the University of Delhi, India. Previously, I was interning and then working full time with a German startup on entity resolution and master data management. My academic and professional interest ranges from applications of deep learning in healthcare to societal computing, intending to improve “ease-of-working” for millions. I am a football nerd and wouldn’t mind discussing the failing tactics of Barcelona in length over Asian food. Like most engineers, I heavily rely on caffeine and enjoy tea over the mountains while adoring the sunset.

I have completed my undergraduate studies at National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, India, in electronics and communications engineering. I am interested in programming languages, learned embedding for code, and the HCI aspect of programming. I am very excited to work in the AI for programming education project. We are currently working on building intelligent and personalized tutoring tools to help teach programming better. Apart from this, I am an avid RC hobbyist and I love to travel.

I am a 4th (read: 100th) year PhD student at UIUC where I think about problems at the intersection of deep learning and logic learning. In particular I am interested in learning frameworks that can glean aggregations of features and associate them to concrete symbols that can then be manipulated using a higher-order logical/programmatic layer. I am trying to figure out what I stand for in terms of AI philosophy but I am always open to learning about new mathematical formulations and pursue problems that aren’t in the horizon of what seems possible in the next five years. My time at Microsoft so far has been a blinding revelation of what it means to keep an eye on building useful products, and I am loving every minute of it! When I am not working or worrying about working, I am singing, biking, or making up bad puns and malaphors. Hit me up if you want to talk about Responsible AI, Neurodivergence, Thriller Movies, or The Office.

I am a second-year PhD student at Stanford, coming from Brazil, where I graduated with a MSc in Compilers at UFMG. My research has focused on developing useful forms of human-computer interaction where the burden of specification doesn’t fall entirely on users. I believe that modern tools developed in the AI and Programming Languages communities can allow the average computer user to have the productivity benefits of automation that currently require programming knowledge. Besides research, I enjoy road biking, playing and making music, cooking, reading, and writing prose poetry. My second name (Poesia) means “Poetry” in Portuguese, so being part of PROSE is an interesting coincidence.

I am a second-year PhD student working on the intersection of human-computer interaction and program synthesis, advised by Dr. Elena Glassman from Harvard. Fun fact: this is my fifth “first day” at Microsoft. Almost every time I get a Microsoft labeled bottle, but remote work prevented it this time.

I am a Research Intern in the PROSE team. My main research interest is software engineering and programming languages, especially program analysis and program synthesis. In the PROSE team, I am focused on developing program synthesis technologies to improve edit suggestions for software developers. I am a second-year PhD student in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One goal of my PhD research is to develop formal methods for trustworthy deep learning. Specifically, I am interested in developing formal methods to certify and improve the robustness of neural networks and verify the correctness of deep learning software.

Wode “Nimo” Ni is a 2nd year Ph.D. student at CMU working with Ken Koedinger and Josh Sunshine. He is mainly interested in human-computer interaction, programming languages, and building usable tools that help people to understand and learn better. He works to bridge the gap between novices and experts by (1) lowering the barrier of powerful tools and (2) encoding expertise and transferring it to novices. In the past few years, he has been working on theories and tools for diagramming. Examples include Natural Diagramming (opens in new tab), a set of design guidelines for effective diagramming tools, and Penrose (opens in new tab), a diagramming system that lets you create beautiful diagrams by just typing math notations in plain text. When he is not working, he is usually at a pool table, playing a yo-yo, or dancing. Nimo is known to spend an inestimable amount of time playing pool, so he is always up for a pool game.

Kia is a PhD candidate at Purdue university working under the supervision of Suresh Jagannathan and Benjamin Delaware. His main research interests are compilation, synthesis and testing of data-intensive programs. Specifically, he has developed a run-time tool for enforcement of fine-grained (weak) consistency guarantees in distributed “NoSQL” databases and also worked on an end-to-end testing framework for programs running on such systems. He recently developed an idea to repair concurrency bugs present in aforementioned programs, solely by modifying the underlying data-model and without incurring additional run-time checks. He considers himself an existentialist and is not very good at abstracting himself via common human languages. He enjoys having long walks in the nature and playing music. He is very excited to be a part of PROSE team!

I am a first-year PhD student at UC San Diego in the Programming Systems group advised by Nadia Polikarpova. I am interested in programming languages and formal methods research, with an emphasis on automated program synthesis and verification techniques. My project, SyPhon, is a constraint based synthesis system for learning fully interpretable phonological rules from a set of examples. Currently, I am working with the PROSE team at Microsoft with Gustavo Soares and Alan Leung. I am working on BluePencil, an on-the-fly synthesis system that identifies repetitive changes and automatically suggests transformations that can be applied in other locations. Besides research, I am involved in diversity, equity and inclusion activities – I am on the board of UCSD’s GradWIC and DEI committee. I also enjoy hiking, biking and pretty much anything involving being outdoors.

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I work at the Database Lab under the supervision of Prof. Alexandra Meliou. My research interest is in the area of data management. Particularly, I am interested in database usability. My recent project was SQuID (opens in new tab), which is a semantic similarity aware query by example system towards query intent discovery from few user provided examples. In 2018, I was a Research Intern at Microsoft Research, Redmond, in the Data Management, Exploration and Mining (DMX) group and my mentor was Suman Nath. This year, I am working with the PROSE team on data understanding and data-drift detection with Ashish Tiwari and Sumit Gulwani. Outside research, I am interested in piano, hiking, traveling, tv-series, reading books, and music.

Xiang Gao is a Ph.D. student in the School of Computing at National University of Singapore under the supervision of Abhik Roychoudhury. His thesis work is focused on using program analysis, test generation and formal methods to aid users in fixing software bugs and writing programs. He designed techniques to improve the quality of automatically generated programs by automated program repair and program synthesis. He was a Research Intern at Microsoft, where he worked on a project to use semi-supervised program synthesis for program transformations with the PROSE team, Gustavo Soares, Arjun Radhakrishna, and Sumit Gulwani.

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee researching software engineering and human-computer interaction. I design and build more usable software development tools by applying human-computer interaction methodologies to software engineering with the goal of increasing developer productivity. Recently, I have been integrating predictive models into development environments in the form of recommendation systems and intelligent program analyzers. My collaboration with the PROSE Team aims to understand the fundamental barriers that data scientists face and design tools for comprehending data more effectively.

I am currently pursuing my PhD in computer science at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA Since 2017, I have been working under the supervision of Dr. Danny Dig. I am a Java enthusiast, and enjoy developing tools for Java developers. My research interest currently is static code analysis, software refactoring and empirical software engineering. I received my Bachelors in Computer Engineering from Mumbai University, Mumbai, India. I have worked as a Java developer for Barclays Investment Bank, Barclays Technology Center India, Pune, India, where I contributed in developing their Trade and Transaction Reporting platform.

Nicholas Nelson is a 5th year PhD student working with Dr. Anita Sarma at Oregon State University. His research is at the intersection of Software Engineering and HCI, focusing on translating cognitive problem-solving processes into developer tools and environments. Using empirical research methods, he combines insights about how developers work with new developer tools that more closely mirror those efficient natural workflows. His work has been published and recognized with best paper awards at top SE conferences such as ICSE, FSE, and ICSME, and in the Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) journal. He is working with Titus Barik on extending the integrated code/narrative nature of JupyterLab with insights from observations of common barriers and workflows of data scientists.

Zhengkai Wu is currently a third year PhD student in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with Prof. Tao Xie. His research interest includes involving Artificial Intelligence techniques into traditional software engineering problems like test generation. From now until December, he is working with Vu Le on helping data scientists to make visualization of data easier. Outside research, Zhengkai enjoys playing video games and watching animations. He is also experienced in competitive programming. He competed in ACM-ICPC and got silver medal in World Final representing Peking University during undergrad. He is now the coach of the UIUC ICPC team.

Mengshi Zhang is a Research Scientist at Facebook. He obtained his masters and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Before that, he received his bachelors degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2014. At UT Austin, he was a member of the Software Verification Validation and Testing Laboratory led by Prof. Sarfraz Khurshid. His research interests lie in Automated Software Debugging and Deep Learning.

I am Ian Drosos, a 5th year PhD candidate in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego. I research Human-Computer Interaction with Philip Guo as part of the Design Lab, where I investigate the designing and implementing of tools to support and enhance the workflows of content creators, developers, data scientists, and learners. While I was a research intern with the PROSE team, we designed and developed Wrex to provide readable program synthesis to data scientists within their computational notebooks.

Anders Miltner worked with the PROSE team on IntelliCode Refactoring. He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2020. Anders Miltner is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UT Austin, working on synthesizing functional programs and data structures.

After his PROSE internship, Kevin Ellis completed his PhD in cognitive science at MIT, then worked as a research scientist at Common Sense Machines, and has now joined the computer science faculty at Cornell. He still synthesizes programs.

I am Saswat, and I interned with PROSE in the summer + fall of 2016. I was working on pattern synthesis and the initial version of Matching.Text. I am currently an applied scientist in the Automated Reasoning Group at Amazon Web Services (AWS), working on invariant synthesis and more generally on scaling software verification. Prior to joining AWS, I graduated from UCLA in 2020 with a PhD in computer science. My research interests span across program verification, program synthesis, and statistical learning.

Dana is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion. She interned at MSR in 2015 and worked on automatically converting spreadsheet tables to relational tables.

I am John Feser, a first year grad student at Rice University, advised by Swarat Chaudhuri. My research is on program synthesis, and this summer, I will be working with the SIP team and the FlashXteam to build a synthesis system for extracting and analyzing data from log files. In my free time I like biking, hiking, and cooking.

Thorsten interned at MSR in 2015 and worked on the improvement of the FlashFill synthesis algorithm in Excel, experimenting with different machine learning techniques. After his internship he returned to the Institute of Science and Technology Austria to complete his PhD. He is currently working as a Research Engineer at the Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna.

Xinyu is currently an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and computer science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He obtained his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019 and was a researcher in the PROSE team until 2020. His research interests include programming languages, formal methods, and software engineering.