Steve Holtzen

(he/him/his)

Assistant Professor

Steven Holtzen
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Programming languages
  • Formal methods
  • PhD in Computer Science, UCLA
  • MS in Computer Science, UCLA
  • BS in Computer Science, UCLA

Steve Holtzen is an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston.

Holtzen's research — which lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and programming languages — focuses on systems of probabilistic modeling and reasoning. He designs systems that make probabilistic modeling fast, accessible, and useful for solving everyday reasoning tasks. In doing so, Holtzen tackles automated reasoning, probabilistic verification, probabilistic inference, tractable probabilistic modeling, and probabilistic programming languages. He teaches courses in artificial intelligence, programming languages, and machine learning, and is affiliated with the Programming Research Laboratory.

Before joining Khoury College in 2021, Holtzen earned his doctorate in computer science from UCLA, where he worked as a research assistant. At the same time, he served on the technical staff in the cyber data analytics department at Sandia National Laboratories.

Holtzen was named Outstanding Graduating PhD Student by the UCLA Computer Science Department and won the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA 2020. He has published at UAI, ICML, CAV, and ASPLOS.

  • Scaling Exact Inference for Discrete Probabilistic Programs

    Citation: Steven Holtzen, Guy Van den Broeck, and Todd Millstein. 2020. Scaling exact inference for discrete probabilistic programs. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 4, OOPSLA, Article 140 (November 2020), 31 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3428208

  • Model Checking Finite-Horizon Markov Chains with Probabilistic Inference

    Citation: Model Checking Finite-Horizon Markov Chains with Probabilistic Inference. Steven Holtzen, Sebastian Junges, Marcell Vazquez-Chanlatte, Todd Millstein, Sanjit A. Seshia, and Guy Van den Broeck. In International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), 2021.

Current PhD Students