[exploding note] Apply to Mentor Secure Program Synthesis Fellowship by May 5th

Quinn
Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:50:21 GMT

Apart and the secure program synthesis community are launching a fellowship! A ton of you reading this would make great mentors— but the mentor application deadline is a mere week away, so we have an emergency edition of the newsletter to persuade you to apply.

In this sentence, I am very informally and unofficially implying that direct AI security widgets/products will get Very Special Bonus Points in the mentor peer review / rating that I do.

Additionally, there will be a hackathon May 22-24 on the same topics.

Dates: June - September 2026

Gross World LoC (Line of Code) is skyrocketing due to AI. By default, we have no way of knowing if what we’re vibecoding is doing what we think its doing. Secure program synthesis, on the other hand, is the intervention for throwing advanced software correctness techniques at all the code coming out of the AIs.

This fellowship offers part-time research opportunities on mentor-led projects at the intersection of formal methods, AI systems, and security. Participants work in small teams to tackle challenging, underspecified problems in specification, validation, and adversarial robustness.

A joint initiative of Apart Research and Atlas Computing.

Key Dates

April 28th - May 5th 2026: Mentor Applications open

May 10th 2026: Mentors Announced and Participant Applications open

May 26th 2026: Participant Applications Close

June 9th 2026: Participants Announced

June 15th 2026: Projects Begin

July/August 2026: Mid-Project Presentations & Milestone Submissions

August/Septemer 2026: Final submissions

September/October 2026: Demo day

Focus Areas

Specification Elicitation

Develop tools and workflows for extracting formal specifications from ambiguous, distributed, or implicit sources (e.g., documentation, legacy systems, human stakeholders). Projects may include structured editors, GUIs, or pipelines that translate informal requirements into formal representations (e.g., Lean), building on approaches like “SpecIDE.”

Specification Validation

Design methods to verify that extracted specifications are correct and complete. This includes techniques for testing, cross-checking, or formally validating whether a specification accurately captures intended system behavior.

Spec-Driven Development & Evaluation

Explore workflows where specifications generate multiple candidate implementations, which are then evaluated against each other. Projects may involve building “arenas” to compare robustness, correctness, or performance across implementations derived from the same spec.

Adversarial Robustness for FM & QA Tools

Investigate failure modes in formal methods pipelines, LLM-assisted tooling, and QA systems. Projects may focus on adversarial inputs, robustness guarantees, or identifying weaknesses in automated reasoning and verification systems.

Full list of mentor projects coming soon.

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