The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing named Armando Solar-Lezama because the inaugural Distinguished College of Computing Professor, effective July 1. 

Solar-Lezama is the primary person appointed to this position generously endowed by Professor Jae S. Lim of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Established within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the chair is being awarded to Solar-Lezama for being an excellent faculty member who’s recognized as a pacesetter and innovator.

“I’m pleased to make this appointment and recognize Armando for his remarkable contributions to MIT and the scientific community,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I’m greatly appreciative of Professor Lim for his thoughtful gesture in creating this recent chair in the school, providing us with the chance to acknowledge the accomplishments of our faculty.”

Solar-Lezama, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, leads the Computer-Aided Programming Group within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) that focuses on program synthesis, an area of research that lies on the intersection of programming systems and artificial intelligence. The group’s research ranges from designing recent evaluation techniques and automatic reasoning mechanisms to developing recent programming models that automate difficult elements of programming.

A member of the EECS faculty since 2008, Solar-Lezama, who also serves because the associate director and chief operating officer for CSAIL, is most occupied with software synthesis and its applications to particular program domains akin to high-performance computing. He first found this area of interest area of program synthesis as a graduate student on the University of California at Berkeley, for which his thesis project, a language called Sketch, treats program synthesis as a search problem through which the algorithms pare down the search space to make the search faster and more efficient. Since then, program synthesis research has greatly expanded into the energetic field it’s today.