Steven Holtzen
Assistant Professor
Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University.
PhD. Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles.
Email: s.holtzen@northeastern.edu
Office: West Village H Room 320
Address:
Northeastern University
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
320 West Village H
440 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
overview
My research is at the intersection of programming languages and artificial intelligence. I am part of the Programming Research Laboratory at Northeastern University, and I guide the Northeastern Probabilistic Programming Laboratory (NeuPPL). Brief biography.
I like designing systems that make probabilistic modeling fast, accessible, and useful for solving every day reasoning tasks. 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. My group develops rsdd, a high-performance implementation of tractable probabilistic models in rust.
- Automated reasoning and probabilistic verification; see this paper for our latest work on program logics for probabilistic program verification.
news
- May 1, 2025
- Roulette accepted to PLDI 2025.
- Mar 5, 2025
- Congratulations Sam and John on the accepted OOPSLA paper Multi-Language Probabilistic Programming, and congratulations Minsung and John on his accepted OOPSLA paper Scaling Optimization Over Uncertainty via Compilation!
- Dec 31, 2024
- Received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. Thank you NSF!
- Apr 17, 2024
- Congratulations John on his accepted LICS paper “A Nominal Approach to Probabilistic Separation Logic”, and congratulations Poorva on her accepted PLDI paper “Bit Blasting Probabilistic Programs”.
- Mar 20, 2024
- I am excited to be lecturing at OPLSS in 2024 on probabilistic programming.
- Sep 5, 2023
- I am co-organizing LAFI 2024 at POPL 2024 in London!
- Jul 3, 2023
- Congratulations Minsung for his first-place finish in the PLDI 2023 Student Research Competition
- Mar 1, 2023
- John Li’s paper Lilac: a Modal Separation Logic for Conditional Probability was accepted to PLDI 2023.
- 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!