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

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 2026Gross 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 DatesApril 28th - May 5th 2026: Mentor Applications openMay 10th 2026: Mentors Announced and Participant Applications openMay 26th 2026: Participant Applications CloseJune 9th 2026: Participants AnnouncedJune 15th 2026: Projects BeginJuly/August 2026: Mid-Project Presentations & Milestone SubmissionsAugust/Septemer 2026: Final submissionsSeptember/October 2026: Demo dayFocus AreasSpecification ElicitationDevelop 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 ValidationDesign methods to