João Ferreira, researcher at INESC-ID’s Automated Reasoning and Software Reliability and Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI), has been named one of the recipients of the Amazon Research Award (ARA) – Fall 2024, in the highly competitive field of Automated Reasoning.

His winning proposal, titled “Polyglot Automated Program Repair for Infrastructure as Code”, focuses on developing techniques for automatically repairing programs written for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) environments.

The Amazon Research Awards are among the most prestigious recognitions in the tech research ecosystem. Every year, the program receives a large number of proposals which are rigorously evaluated by Amazon’s internal teams of scientists. Past and present awardees include researchers from world-leading institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.

The award provides not only financial support for Ferreira’s research but also access to over 700 public datasets hosted by Amazon, as well as AWS AI/ML services and tools through AWS Promotional Credits. Moreover, Ferreira will benefit from personalized support from an Amazon research contact, who will offer guidance and facilitate participation in Amazon-led events, workshops, and training sessions.

“Automated Reasoning is an important area of research for Amazon, with potential applications across various features and applications to help improve security, reliability, and performance for our customers,” said Robert Jones, Senior Principal Scientist with Amazon’s Cloud Automated Reasoning Group.

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