Building the next generation AI systems
In this interview with the European Research Council, Professor Martin Vechev of the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab talks about his ERC-funded work, AI breakthroughs, and Europe’s future in the field of AI.
Your ERC-funded BIGCODE project aimed to change the way developers build and reason about software. Could you tell us more about it? With the project nearly finished, did you achieve what you set out to do?
My team and I combine two rather different computer science worlds, advanced programming languages and machine learning, to develop new probabilistic models for learning-based systems. These are the systems able to automatically learn and improve from their experience.
Our project built numerous such systems and was instrumental in shaping and creating a new sub-area of learning, triggering follow-up research in the process. Some of the systems we built during the project are already widely used. For example, external pageJSNice for converting a complicated code into a simple form has hundreds of thousands of users.
Based on the results of the BIGCODE project you co-founded a spin-off called DeepCode, which was recently acquired by a billion-dollar company in cybersecurity. What does DeepCode do?
The success of the big code systems we built in academia encouraged us to create an even more broadly applicable tool. One from which every developer and company in the world could benefit. We wanted to address the issue of programmers spending a lot of time on reviewing and fixing code, rather than creating new one. This is how DeepCode came to life in 2016.
To explain what DeepCode does, we could use an analogy with Grammarly, a system that takes as input a sentence (code in our case) and produces automated suggestions for how to fix the sentence (the code). Our technology automatically examines billions of lines of code found in open source repositories and learns how to detect and repair defects in new, unseen, code. This is unlike any other system today.
What makes your work frontier research?
I think our project successfully shows what ERC grants are all about. We developed fundamentally new techniques that helped expand a new area in science. Our project built widely used systems demonstrating the potential of the methods, and the international scientific community recognised our work and breakthroughs at the highest level. This project ultimately helped create a successful high-tech start-up, leading to more jobs and opportunities in Europe.
We also received various awards for our frontier work. The one I am most proud of is the prestigious ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award given to my former PhD student Veselin Raychev. It was only the third time in the 40-year history of the award that a European PhD was recognised.