First Wins 2022-2023 Outstanding Dissertation Award

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Emily First MS’20, PhD’23 is the recipient of the 2022-2023 Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Outstanding Dissertation Award.

First’s dissertation, “Automating the Formal Verification of Software,” explores technology that addresses the challenges of proof synthesis—automatically generating formal proofs of software correctness—by leveraging advanced machine learning (ML) techniques and large language models (LLMs). 

She developed a suite of tools to improve proof synthesis and enable fully automating more verification, each addressing different aspects of the proof generation process—from modeling proof context and semantics to enhancing diversity in model learning and using transformers to generate complete proofs. 

“Dr. First is a remarkable scientist,” said First’s doctoral advisor and collaborator Yuriy Brun. “Her work requires deep expertise in two distant fields, formal verification and natural language processing. Many experts struggle to master just one, while Dr. First has successfully mastered both, creating deep solutions using the latest advances in natural language processing to solve critical problems in formal verification. The high quality of her work and the difficulty of the problems she tackles have resulted in numerous awards, including three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at our most prestigious conferences in the last four years.”

First is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego. Her research lies at the intersection of software engineering, programming languages, and machine learning, with a specific focus on creating tools to automatically generate proofs of software correctness. First's research was also recently referenced in a paper that received a Distinguished Best Paper Award.

The CICS Outstanding Dissertation Awards are given annually to graduating doctoral students in recognition of exceptional work and to encourage the highest levels of computer science scholarship and research. Awardees are nominated by CICS faculty.