Hi! I am a Computer Science PhD Student on the CMU Portugal Affiliated PhD Program. My advisors are Vasco Manquinho at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisboa and Ruben Martins at Carnegie Mellon University. My research focuses on helping programmers and non-programmes on their daily tasks, by leveraging Program Synthesis and Program Repair techniques. Some of my other research interests include Formal Methods and Compilers. Feel free to talk to me about any of these topics!

Publications

Combining Logic and Large Language Models for Assisted Debugging and Repair of ASP Programs in ICST 2025

Ricardo Brancas, Vasco Manquinho and Ruben Martins

This paper introduces FormHe, a novel tool that integrates logic-based techniques with Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect and correct issues in Answer Set Programming submissions.

Paper arXiv Code

Towards Reliable SQL Synthesis: Fuzzing-Based Evaluation and Disambiguation in FASE 2024

Ricardo Brancas, Miguel Terra-Neves, Miguel Ventura, Vasco Manquinho and Ruben Martins

This paper introduces CUBES, a parallel SQL program synthesizer using input-output examples and a user-guided disambiguation process, achieving up to 60% accuracy and super-linear speedups by leveraging multicore architectures.

Paper arXiv (extended) Code

On Repairing Natural Language to SQL Queries in arXiv

Aidan Z.H. Yang, Ricardo Brancas, Pedro Esteves, Sofia Aparicio, Joao Pedro Nadkarni, Miguel Terra-Neves, Vasco Manquinho, Ruben Martins

Paper arXiv

Projects

ProFix

ProFix is an ongoing project that aims to help students taking classes on Logic Programming. In the first stage of this project we are surveying students to find the most common problems and difficulties with learning Prolog.

FormHe

FormHe is a tool which helps users find and fix problems in ASP programs. FormHe is composed of two modules: a fault localizer module and a program repair module. The fault localizer identifies which statements of the program need to be changed/removed, based on an exemplifying query provided by the user. Then, FormHe provides the user with suggestions for how to fix the identified problems using program synthesis techniques.

Cubes

CUBES is a parallel program synthesizer for the domain of SQL queries using input-output examples. CUBES extends existing sequential query synthesizers with new pruning techniques and a divide-and-conquer approach, splitting the search space into smaller independent sub-problems.