Armando Solar-Lezama

Armando Solar-Lezama is a professor at MIT, where he leads the Computer Aided Programming Group and is also the Associate Director and COO of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

Prof. Solar-Lezama was born in Mexico City, where he lived until his family migrated to Texas when he was fifteen. In Texas, he attended Texas A&M University, where he earned B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. From there, he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his PhD for his early work on program synthesis.

Prof. Solar-Lezama is best known for his work on generating programs from high-level specifications. His early work focused on the development of the Sketch program synthesis language which introduced many ideas that became the foundation of the modern field of program synthesis. In recent years, his research has focused on the combination of deep learning and symbolic reasoning in order to generate programs, as well as in the application of techniques from program synthesis to problems outside of software development in areas as varied as education, computer aided design, robotics and computational biology.