I am the OP. Along with Ras and Henele, we are leading efforts in program synthesis at Synthetic Minds (YC S’18). I started working on synthesis in 2007; and Ras has been developing these techniques since the late 90s and is an ACM fellow for his work in program synthesis.

The researchers will talk about their peer-reviewed work in web automation, hardware security, operating system extensions, programming for non-programmers, automatic code translation, and superoptimization. Hopefully, this will illustrate the power and limitations. We'd love for people to extrapolate from these onto their own domain-specific automation needs.

By touching upon foundational techniques (making imperative code functional, symbolic compilation, SMT encodings, partial evaluation), hopefully the leap to "code synthesis" will seem less like magic and more like an obvious next step. In addition, open-source frameworks exist (e.g., Rosette, Sketch) that abstract away these foundations, and the program will cover those in hands-on workshops.

We’d love to hear insights into application from people for whom synthesis is new. Some problems are exciting to us (Synthetic Minds is working on smart contract synthesis); and we’d love for the community to brainstorm applications to their domains.