Franco joined Amazon Prime Video Builder Tools as an Amazon Scholar in January 2019 to help build tools that can reason automatically about various aspects of software and system development, with the aim of providing software quality assurances to customers.
Franco is on leave from his position as professor of computer science at Middlesex University, London, and is working full-time with the Prime Video Automated Reasoning Group. “In my role as a professor I was mostly interested in applying logic-based methods to solve concrete, practical problems. Amazon is the ideal place to scale my interests to large, customer-facing code bases.”
It is exciting to see my research have an immediate positive impact for customers. There is a bias for action at Amazon that is very refreshing: every day is really always Day One!
Since the very beginning, Franco worked with colleagues to dive deep into the issue of contract verification. “Hidden assumptions are a common source of bugs in software, especially in large organizations where multiple, independent teams contribute to complex products. A lack of clarity around the boundaries of components and a lack of understanding of what the assumptions behind each component are can lead to a negative customer experience. The Prime Video Automated Reasoning group works to empower Amazon customers with the ability to define interfaces between components that have strong, tool-checked contracts. I am impressed by my colleagues’ skills and by their ability to move quickly from high-level design discussions to technical details of multi-component systems. It is exciting to see my research have an immediate positive impact for customers. There is a bias for action at Amazon that is very refreshing: every day is really always Day One!”
Learn more about our Amazon Scholars program.
