Steven Holtzen

Assistant Professor
Khoury College of Computer Science, Northeastern University.

PhD. Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles.

Email: s.holtzen@northeastern.edu

Office: West Village H Room 310D

Address:
Northeastern University
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
310D West Village H
440 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115

overview

My research focuses on programming languages, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. My goal is to design systems that make probabilistic modeling fast, accessible, and useful for solving every day reasoning tasks. Broadly my research focuses on:

The design, implementation, and applications of probabilistic programming languages. I am currently the lead developer for dice; see this blog post for more information.
Foundations of probabilistic inference and tractable probabilistic modeling. Check out this paper on exploiting symmetry and this paper on unifying probabilistic circuits with determinantal point processes.
Automated reasoning and probabilistic verification.

I am currently recruiting students at all levels. Please email me if you are interested in working with me.

news

Sep 5, 2022: I am co-organizing LAFI 2023 at POPL 2023 in Boston – please submit your work!
Jul 1, 2022: New funding: We received an NSF Formal Methods in the Field (FMiTF) award for exploring separation logic and type systems for scaling probabilistic reasoning (co-PI: Amal Ahmed). Thank you NSF!
Jan 7, 2022: Our ASPLOS paper Logical Abstractions for Noisy Variational Qantum Algorithm Simulation was selected for a IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention!
Jan 1, 2022: My advisee Ellie Cheng received a CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Honorable Mention! Congrats Ellie!
Oct 25, 2021: My advisee Yu-Hsi presented her work on optimizing probabilistic programs at PROBPROG 2021
Aug 23, 2021: Started as an assistant professor at Northeastern
Jun 7, 2021: I graduated with my PhD. and received the UCLA Computer Science Oustanding Graduating PhD. Student Award