99% of people who own computers do not know how to program, and even experts often struggle to code accurately. Through a new frontier in AI, program synthesis, we can help everyone generate programs that accomplish their tasks faster and more accurately, from users who have never written a line of code to professional developers. In program synthesis the computer programs itself. The user just needs to tell the synthesizer what they want—via examples or just in natural language—and the synthesizer generates the desired program. This provides huge productivity boosts in varied domains from data preparation to code editing.

The PROSE team is advancing the state of the art in program synthesis and shipping these innovations through flagship Microsoft products like Excel, Visual Studio, PowerShell, and SQL Server Management Studio. PROSE has developed a powerful and flexible framework for program synthesis that leverages techniques from both logical reasoning and machine learning and combines them in unique ways to synthesize programs automatically. This approach has been recognized with regular papers at top-tier conferences; a few of them won best paper and test-of-time awards.