Steven Holtzen

Email: s.holtzen@northeastern.edu

Office: West Village H Room 320

Address:
Northeastern University
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
310D 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).

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.

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!
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 Ellie presented her work on optimizing probabilistic programs at PROBPROG 2021