The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year, $10 million grant to researchers at MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale who are working to develop tools to get rid of software bugs. Their project, titled Expeditions in Computing: The Science of Deep Specification (DeepSpec), aims to create mathematical tools that will allow developers to create bug-free applications.
?Today?s critical software systems are neither secure nor reliable. Existing programming tools and languages do not provide good support for writing certified software,? said Zhong Shao, computer science professor at Yale. ?With the proliferation of new robots, the Internet of Things and cloud computers, computer software is only going to become even more complex. To control such complexity, we have to develop new technologies and tools that turn software development into a more principled and rigorous practice.?
