Computer and Information Science
Below is a list of graduates of the CIS doctoral program from 1999 to the present, including information on their dissertations and current positions.
Name: Kenneth Chaney Advisor: Kostas Daniilidis Thesis Title: Event-Based Vision Systems: Bridging Biological Inspiration and Robotic Perception Position: Associate Director of AI and Technology, Penn Advanced Research Computing Center (PARCC)
Name: Neeraj Gandhi Advisor: Linh Thi Xuan Phan Thesis Title: Bounded-Time Detection and Recovery from Faults in Large-Scale, Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems Position: Engineer, Oracle
Name: Harrison Goldstein Advisor: Benjamin Pierce Thesis Title: Property-Based Testing for the People Position: Victor Basili Postdoc, University of Maryland
Name: Paul He Advisor: Steve Zdancewic Thesis Title: Rely-Guarantee Semantics for Separation-Logic-Based Specification Extraction Position: Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
Name: Konstantinos Kallas Advisor: Rajeev Alur Thesis Title: Just-in-time Scale-out of Shell Programs, Correctly Position: Assistant Professor, UCLA CS
Name: Seungwon Lee Advisor: Eric Eaton Thesis Title: Deep Lifelong Learning with Factorized Knowledge Transfer Position:
Name: Tong Liu Advisor: Konrad Kording & Lyle Ungar Thesis Title: Improving Observational Causality Using Machine Learning Position: Assistant Professor of CS, Mount Holyoke College
Name: Duc Nguyen Advisor: Anderson Zhang Thesis Title: Statistical Spectral Algorithms for Discrete Data Position: Engineer, Aquatic Capital Management
Name: Daniel George Noble Advisor: Brett Hemenway Falk Thesis Title: Distributed Oblivious RAM: Progress and Pitfalls Position: Cryptography Consultant, Silence Laboratories
Name: Prathamesh Patil Advisor: Sanjeev Khanna Thesis Title: Towards Scalability and Robustness for Ranking, Clustering, and Multi-Armed Bandits Position: Senior Associate, JP Morgan Chase
Name: Sydney Pugh Advisor: Insup Lee, Oleg Sokolsky, James Weimer Thesis Title: Weakly-Supervised Evaluation of Medical AI Systems Position: Postdoc, Penn
Name: Shreyas Skandan Shivakumar Advisor: Camillo Jose Taylor Thesis Title: Learning Visual Concepts Position:
Name: Halley R. Young Advisor: Osbert Bastani Thesis Title: Specification-Guided Generative Models Position: Postdoc, Microsoft Research
Name: Liangcheng Yu Advisor: Vincent Liu Thesis Title: Toward Zero-waste Terabit Networked Systems Position: Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
Name: Haoran Zhang Advisor: Sebastian Angel & Vincent Liu Thesis Title: The Design of Correct and Efficient Serverless Microservices Position: Research Scientist, Meta
Name: Li Zhang Advisor: Christopher Callison-Burch Thesis Title: Structured Event Reasoning with Large Language Models Position: Assistant Professor, Drexel University
Name: Ke Zhong Advisor: Sebastian Angel Thesis Title: Towards a New Online Advertising System with Privacy, Accountability, and Anti-fraud Position: Security Engineer, Snap Inc.
Name: Xuanyu Zhou Advisor: Dan Roth Thesis Title: Incidental Decomposition for Complex Reasoning Position: Assistant Professor, Arizona State University
Name: Oshin Agarwal Advisor: Ani Nenkova Thesis Title: Practical Named Entity Recognition: The Role of Entity and its Context Position: Senior NLP Research Engineer – Bloomberg
Name: Bernadette Bucher Advisor: Kostas Daniilidis Thesis Title: Active Learning of Vision-based Representations for Robotics Position: Research Scientist – The Boston Dynamics AI Institute
Name: Haoxian Chen Advisor: Boon Thau Loo Thesis Title: Program Synthesis for Declarative Systems Position: Assistant Professor, Shanghai Tech University
Name: Hangfeng He Advisor: Dan Roth Thesis Title: Incidental Supervision for Natural Language Understanding Position: Assistant Professor, Goergen Institute for Data Science, U of Rochester
Name: Daphne E. Ippolito Advisor: Chris Callison-Burch Thesis Title: Understanding the Limitations of Using Large Language Models for Text Generation Position: Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon
Name: Kishor Jothimurugan Advisor: Rajeev Alur Thesis Title: Specification-Guided Reinforcement Learning Position: Quantitative Researcher, Two Sigma
Name: Seoungjun (Elijah) Lee Advisor: Vijay Kumar Thesis Title: Perception-Action Loop for Multi-Robot Systems with Deep Learning Position: Software Engineer, Latitude AI
Name: Pardis Pashakhanloo, Advisor: Mayur Naik Thesis Title: Integrating Declarative Static Analysis with Neural Models of Code Position: Founding AI Engineer, Codemod
Name: Oleh Rybkin Advisor: Kostas Daniilidis Thesis Title: Learning To Act From Diverse Data Sources Via World Models Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, UC Berkeley
Name: Karl F. Schmeckpeper Advisor: Kostas Daniilidis Thesis Title: Learning Perceptual Prediction: Learning from Humans and Reasoning about Objects Position: Research Scientist Position, Boston Dynamics AI Institute
Name: Kelly R. Shiptoski Advisor: Joe Devietti Thesis Title: Reproducibility and Performance Optimizations for Unmodified Linux Programs Position: Senior Software Engineer, Bolt Labs
Name: Aalok D. Thakkar Advisor: Rajeev Alur, Mayur Naik Thesis Title: Example-guided Synthesis of Relational Queries Position: Research Scientist, Aptos Labs
Name: Lingzhi Zhang Advisor: Jianbo Shi Thesis Title: Bridging Visual Generation and Recognition Models Position: Research Scientist, Adobe
Name: Sean Bowman Advisor: George Pappas Thesis Title: Semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Position: Senior Engineer, SLAM
Name: Yu Chen Advisors: Sampath Kannan, Sanjeev Khanna Thesis Title: Sublinear Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Combinatorial Problems Position: Postdoc – EPFL
Name: Nikolaos Kolotouros Advisor: Kostas Daniilidis Thesis Title: Reconstructing 3D Humans from Images Position: Research Scientist, Google
Name: Yao Li Advisor: Stephanie Weirich Thesis Title: Mechanized Reasoning about “How” using Functional Programs and Embeddings Position: Assistant Professor at Portland State University
Name: Yishuai Li Advisor: Benjamin Pierce Thesis Title: Testing by Dualization Position: Senior Development Engineer – Alibaba Group
Name: Wenxin Liu Advisors: Kostas Daniilidis & Vijay Kumar Thesis Title: Visual-Inertial State Estimation with Information Deficiency Position: Localization Team Lead, R&D VP at LF Intelligence Limited
Name: Jorge Mendez Mendez Advisor: Eric Eaton Thesis Title: Lifelong Machine Learning of Functionally Compositional Structures Position: Postdoctoral Fellow at the Learning & Intelligent Systems Group – MIT CSAIL
Name: Chao Qu Advisor: Camillo J. Taylor Thesis Title: Deep Basis Fitting for Depth Completion Position: Autonomy Engineer – Computer Vision – Skydio
Name: Edo N. Roth Advisor: Andreas Haeberlen Thesis Title: Private Federated Analytics at Scale Position: Software Engineer – Google
Name: Caleb Stanford Advisor: Rajeev Alur Thesis Title: Safe Programming over Distributed Streams Position: Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC, Davis
Name: Li-Yao Xia Advisor: Benjamin Pierce Thesis Title: Executable Denotational Semantics with Interaction Trees Position: Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh
Name: Nofel Yaseen Advisor: Vincent Liu Thesis Title: Network-wide Monitoring and Debugging Position: Research Scientist – Meta
Name: Qizhen Zhang Advisors: Vincent Liu and Boon Thau Loo Thesis Title: Hyperscale Data Processing With Network-Centric Designs Position: Postdoctoral Fellow at Microsoft
Name: Nitish Gupta Thesis Title: Learning to Compositionally Reason Over Natural Language, Spring, 2021 Advisor: Dan Roth Position: Research Scientist, Google AI
Name: Marcella Hastings Thesis Title: Secure Multi-Party Computation In Practice, Spring 2021 Advisor: Nadia Heninger Position: Applied Cryptographer, Bolt Labs, Inc.
Name: Sangdon Park Thesis Title: Uncertainty Estimation Toward Safe AI, Summer, 2021 Advisor: Osbert Bastani and Insup Lee Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, GATech
Name: Stephen Phillips Thesis Title: Learning Representations for Matching, Spring, 2021 Advisor: Kostas Daniilidis Position: Visiting Assistant Professor, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA
Name: Nicholas Roessler Thesis Title: Policy Implementation and Engineering for Tagged Architectures, Spring, 2021 Advisor: André DeHon Position:
Name: Zachary Schutzman Thesis Title: Algorithmic Processes and Social Values, June, 2021 Advisor: Aaron Roth Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, MIT, Boston, MA
Name: Antal Spector-Zabusky Thesis Title: Don’t Mind The Formalization Gap: The Design And Usage Of Hs-To-Coq, Spring 2021 Advisor: Stephanie Weirich Position: Complier Engineer, Jane Street Capital, Ithaca, NY
Name: Joshua Wolper Thesis Title: Material Point Methods for Simulating Material Fracture, April 2021 Advisor: Chenfanfu Jiang Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, Penn MEAM Dept.
Name: Yinjun Wu Thesis Title: Towards the Efficient Use of Fine-Grained Provenance in Data Science Applications, August, 2021 Advisor: Susan B. Davidson Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, CIS Department, Penn
Name: Hengchu Zhang Thesis Title: Automating Program Analysis for Differential Privacy, June, 2021 Advisor: Benjamin Pierce Position:
Name: Nan Zheng Thesis Title: Fine-grained Provenance and Applications to Data Analytics Computation, April, 2021 Advisor: Zachary G. Ives Position: Lecturer, Penn
Name: Anupama Jha Thesis Title: Assembling The Building Blocks For A Unified Splicing Code, Fall, 2020 Advisor: Yoseph Barash Position: Postdoc, University of Washington
Name: Minchen Li Thesis Title: Robust and Accurate Simulation of Elastodynamics and Contact, Fall, 2020 Advisors: Chenfanfu Jiang Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, Penn
Name: David Arney Thesis Title: Medical Device Interoperability with Provable Safety Properties, March, 2019 Advisor: Insup Lee Position: Principal Associate, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA
Name: Gediminas Bertasius Thesis Title: Embodied Visual Perception Models for Human Behavior Understanding, March 2019 Advisor: Jianbo Shi Position: Post-Doc Researcher, Facebook, Boston, MA
Name: Anne Cocos Thesis Title: Paraphrase-Based Models of Lexical Semantics, May, 2019 Advisor: Chris Callison-Burch Position: Engineer, GlaxoSmithKline, Philadelphia, PA
Name: David Isele Thesis Title: Lifelong Reinforcement Learning on Mobile Robots, December, 2018 Advisors: Eric Eaton, CJ Taylor Position: Researcher, Honda Research Institute, Columbus, OH
Name: Shahin Jabbari-Arfaee Thesis Title: Fairness and Feedback in Learning and Games, July 2019 Advisor: Michael Kearns Position: Post-Doc Fellow, Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard
Name: Daniel Khashabi Thesis Title: Reasoning-Driven Question-Answering for Natural Language Understanding, February 2018 Advisor: Dan Roth Position: Young Investigator, Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, WA
Name: Spyridon Leonardos Thesis Title: Collaborative Perception from Data Association to Localization, April 2019 Advisor: Kostas Daniilidis Position: Post-Doc Researcher, University of Pennsylvania
Name: Jason Owens Thesis Title: Visual Perception for Robotic Spatial Understanding, December 2018 Advisor: Kostas Daniilidis Position: Computer Scientist, US Army Research Laboratory
Name: Tolga Ozaslan Thesis Title: Estimation, Mapping and Navigation with Micro Aerial Vehicles for Infrastructure Inspection, Spring 2018 Advisor: Vijay Kumar, CJ Taylor Position: Director of Research Development, OteoHealth
Name: Yuanfeng Peng Thesis Title: Efficient Precise Dynamic Data Race Detection for CPU and GPU, May 2019 Advisor: Joseph Devietti Position: Software Engineer, Google, San Francisco, CA
Name: Rattanachai Ramaithitima Thesis Title: Sensor Coverage Algorithms for Resource-Constrained Robot Swarms, October, 2018 Advisors: Vijay Kumar, Subhrajit Bhattacharya Position: Software Engineer, Nuro, Mountain View, CA
Joao Sedoc Thesis Title: Building and Evaluating Conversational Agents, August 2019 Advisor: Lyle Ungar Position: Assistant Professor, New York University
Shyam Upadhyay Thesis Title: Exploiting Cross-Lingual Representation for Natural Language Processing, February 2019 Advisor: Dan Roth Position: Google Research
Name: Luke Valenta Thesis Title: Measuring and Securing Cryptographic Deployments, May 2019 Advisors: Nadia Heninger Position: Systems Engineer, Cloudflare, Inc., Austin, TX
