Page 10 - GCN, June/July 2018

[BrieFing]
Using
A DARPA-funded attempt at AI-driven software development
blockchain
to update
employee
BY SUSAN MILLER
A team of computer scientists at
Rice University’s Intelligent Software Systems Laboratory has created an application that uses deep learning
to help programmers write code snippets that contain Java application programming interfaces.
Programmers can code to fill in gaps in their programs by querying the application, called Bayou, for either
an API method call that the generated
program should use or an API data type they want the generated code to use. Bayou then determines what kind of program it’s being asked to write.
It uses a technique called neural sketch learning, which trains an artificial neural network to recognize high-level patterns in hundreds of thousands of examples. It does that by creating a “sketch” for each Java program it reads and then associates the sketch with the “intent” for the program, which it gleans from the user’s input.
Bayou was trained with data
from GitHub’s online source code repositories. The Java programs in
the training data are annotated with a label that might contain information such as the set of API calls, library functions or the types used in the code and its metadata. When a user queries based on those labels, Bayou refers
to its sketches to find the most likely matches.
“Based on that guess, a separate part
of Bayou — a module that understands the low-level details of Java and can do automatic logical reasoning — is going to generate four or five different chunks of code,” said Chris Jermaine, Bayou’s co-creator. “It’s going to present those to the user like hits on a web search: ‘This one is most likely the correct answer, but here are three more that could be what you’re looking for.’”
Bayou co-creator Swarat Chaudhuri said: “You usually need to give a lot of details about what the target program does, and writing down these details can be as much work as just writing the code. A developer can give Bayou a very small amount of information
— just a few keywords or prompts, really — and Bayou will try to read the programmer’s mind and predict the program they want.”
“Modern software development is
all about APls,” Bayou architect Vijay Murali said. “These are system-specific rules, tools, definitions and protocols that allow a piece of code to interact with a specific operating system, database, hardware platform or another software system. There are hundreds
of APIs, and navigating them is very difficult for developers. They spend lots of time at question/answer sites like Stack Overflow asking other developers for help.”
Bayou will answer such questions instantaneously. “That immediate feedback could solve the problem right away, and if it doesn’t, Bayou’s example code should lead to a more informed question for their human peers,” Murali said.
Bayou was created through an initiative funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and has been released under a permissive open-source license.•
records
BY SARA FRIEDMAN
When a federal employee moves from one agency to another, it can take up to two months for the Office of Personnel Management to transfer that employee’s records. Using blockchain, though, could trim the process to a few minutes.
Once federal employees have a single digital record that follows them throughout their careers, blockchain could be used to show changes to that record in real time.
“We are looking for ways to have access to the data immediately,” said David Vargas, director of OPM’s human resource line of business, at a recent IBM event. “I can figure out a way
to get the data as transactions are approved.”
Vargas said he became interested in building a blockchain-based prototype for employee records after his chief technology architect suggested that the technology could be used to streamline the recordkeeping involved in employee transfers and retirements.
“I went to my investment review board with the idea, and I asked for limited authority and resources to test this out,” Vargas said. In less than two months, OPM was able to prove that it was possible to transfer an employee digital record through blockchain, he added.
OPM officials expressed an interest in using blockchain in its September 2017 request for information for an employee digital record. At the time, they said they were seeking a blockchain-based data exchange architecture with
both off-chain and on-chain data components. •
10 GCN JUNE/JULY 2018 • GCN.COM