Vaani Goenka’s Research on Program Verification Accepted at ACM COMPUTE
Highlighting Vaani Goenka’s research on automated verification and program correctness, her acceptance at ACM COMPUTE, and her recognition through the RSR Grant for Women in STEM.
Vaani Goenka, a Computer Science & Mathematics student at Ashoka University, has been working on research in automated verification and program correctness in a pedagogical context with Prof. Thakkar from the department. Recently, their work was accepted at ACM COMPUTE, India’s largest CS pedagogy conference. She was also recently awarded the RSR Grant for Women in STEM at Ashoka.
In conventional CS education, student-authored programs and performance on test-cases are relied upon as a proxy for computational thinking. She envisions to move beyond these, with learners being provided with a better way of constructing their programs, where correctness and mathematical reasoning are prioritized. The results suggest that not only is this pedagogically feasible in Introductory CS courses, but it is also necessary for learning goals to be realigned with the foundations of computational thinking in an era of increasingly capable code generation tools.
This achievement highlights not only her technical excellence but also her commitment to advancing pedagogical engagement with the field of Computer Science, reasserting its true meaning.
“The crisis is not that AI undermines education, but that AI reveals how shallow our pedagogical proxies for understanding have been.” said Vaani.
Vaani intends to further develop her automated verification tool to support multiple programming languages and implement it at universities in India.
Congratulations, Vaani, on this incredible milestone!