As part of the Facebook-sponsored evening reception for all POPL conference attendees, Facebook is launching a Probability and Programming Languages research award, presented by Satish Chandra. Facebook is looking for proposals that address fundamental problems at the intersection of machine learning, programming languages and software engineering. Find out more details about the Probability and Programming research award in the next section.

Probability and Programming Research Award

At Facebook, we are doing forward-looking research, as well as putting into production concrete results from several of these threads. We introduced HackPPL, which extends our internal PHP dialect into a full-fledged probabilistic programming language, and are creating extensions to Python to eliminate string-based API patterns. We have started various language-centric projects around acceleration and differentiable programming. We also have a portfolio of projects in the “big code” space, exploring several topics such as code search and recommendation, automatic bug fixing, and program synthesis using machine learning. Together, this work hopes to have impact across all of Facebook’s infrastructure.

To foster further innovation in these topics, and to deepen our collaboration with academia, Facebook is pleased to invite faculty and graduate students to respond to this call for research proposals pertaining to the aforementioned topics.

For more information and to respond to the Probability and Programming request for proposals, visit the research award page.

Facebook Research at POPL

Facebook is a platinum sponsor of the 46th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). The conference is being held Sunday, January 13th through Saturday, January 19th at the Hotel Cascias Miragem in Cascias/Lisbon, Portugal.

A few Facebook researchers are attending the conference to present their work, give talks and participate in academic outreach. Here are the papers and keynotes being presented by Facebook Research:

Paper: Building Your Own Modular Static Analyser with Infer as part of the TutorialFest
Jules Villard, Ezgi Çiçek, Dino Distefano, Nikos Gorogiannis, and Peter O’Hearn

Keynote: Automated Fault-Finding and Fixing at Facebook
Mark Harman

Paper: A True Positives Theorem for a Static Race Detector as part of the Concurrency track
Nikos Gorogiannis, Peter O’Hearn, and Ilya Sergey (Yale-NUS College)