| NSF Org: |
CCF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 1, 2014 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 20, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1446932 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Sol Greenspan
sgreensp@nsf.gov (703)292-7841 CCF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2014 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2016 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $72,950.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $87,539.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2015 = $0.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1350 BEARDSHEAR HALL AMES IA US 50011-2103 (515)294-5225 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
209 Atanasoff Ames IA US 50011-2207 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Software & Hardware Foundation |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Software is an integral part of our everyday lives, and our economy relies heavily on software working correctly. However, bugs in software cause security breaches, and cost our economy billions of dollars annually. While these high costs of bugs are well known, the software industry struggles to remedy the situation because the inherent complexity of the software makes bugs so common that new bugs are typically reported faster than developers can fix them. The goal of this project is to develop a technique that fixes bugs
automatically, greatly reducing the cost of fixing the bugs, improving quality of software, and reducing the negative effects on the economy and society.
Because so much software has already been written, many subroutines, data structures, and algorithm implementations already exist as part of open-source software. Therefore, for many software bugs, there already exist subroutines, data structures, and algorithm implementations in other open-source software that implement the correct behavior and can be substituted into buggy systems to fix the bugs. This project verifies two key properties necessary to build such a bug fixing technique. First, the project attempts to validate the assumption that correct code candidates actually exist in open-source software code bases. Second, the project aims to demonstrate that semantic code search techniques can effectively find these code candidates, and that the gaps between the correct and incorrect versions can be bridged using automatic techniques. Altogether, this exploratory project is intended to establish the feasibility of automated bug fixing through semantic search of open-source software. The broader impact of this work is the advancement of techniques that improve software quality, which, in turn, reduces the negative economic and societal effects of software bugs. This grant is exploratory work on an untested, but potentially transformative, research idea.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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