MUSE

Darpa has an impressive program called Muse that seeks to make significant advances in the way software is built, debugged, verified, maintained and understood. Central to its approach is the creation of a community infrastructure built around a large, diverse and evolving corpus of software drawn from the hundreds of billions of lines of open source code available today.

An integral part of the envisioned infrastructure would be a continuously operational specification mining engine. This engine would leverage deep program analyses and foundational ideas underlying big data analytics to populate and refine a database containing inferences about useful properties, behaviors and vulnerabilities of the program components in the corpus. The collective knowledge gleaned from this effort would facilitate new mechanisms for dramatically improving software reliability, and help develop radically different approaches for automatically constructing and repairing complex software.

Among the many envisioned benefits of the program are scalable automated mechanisms to identify and repair program errors, and specification-based tools to create and synthesize new, custom programs from existing corpus elements based on properties discovered from this mining activity.

The MUSE program is interested in close and continued collaboration of experts from a range of fields, including but not limited to: programming languages, program analysis, theorem proving and verification, testing, compilers, software engineering, machine learning, databases, statisticians, systems and a multitude of application domains. The program intends to emphasize creating and leveraging open source technology.

Very interesting reading is the proposer's day announcement from Feb 2014.