Yewen Pu received his PhD from MIT in 2019. His thesis focused on the interplay of program synthesis and active learning, where a system interacts with an end-user in an informative fashion towards the construction of programs. (Imagine playing “20 questions,” except that the hypothesis space includes all possible programs under a grammar.) His current research interests include bringing principles of communication/linguistics, where considerable progress has been made in mathematically modeling human-human communications, into the field of human-machine communications—by casting program synthesis as a collaborative communication act. He hopes to minimize the friction of programming by building principles of communications into the program synthesizer, so end-users can program more intuitively.