Chris Martens

Associate Professor
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
College of Arts, Media, and Design
Northeastern University

Ph.D. in Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

Email: c.martens at northeastern.edu
Office: Meserve 138 (Boston campus)
Pronouns: they/them

Research Interests

I am interested in elegant computational abstractions that support creative practices. Since I view programming and mathematics as creative practices, this is a purposefully broad scope, but my prior work has been situated mainly in the scope of representing and reasoning about rule systems. Rule systems show up in my work via games (rules as game mechanics), privacy policies (rules as governance documents), procedural design and data generation (rules as constraints and search directives), and inference rules defining programming languages (e.g. in the context of mechanizing metatheory).

My weapon of choice is the deep relationship between (constructive) logics and computation, via (1) logic programming and (2) type systems. This often means extrapolating interesting logics (e.g. substructural, epistemic, modal) into type systems and logic programming languages. Polarity and focusing pervade my thinking about type structure and language design. I believe in the broad potential of dependently-typed languages, largely because they blur the proof/program distinction.

At Northeastern, I am affiliated with the Programming Research Laboratory (PRL) and Games at Northeastern.

Teaching

Professional Activities

  • Program Committee, POPL 2025
  • Invited speaker, TYPES 2025: "A guided tour of polarity and focusing"
  • Review Committee, OOPSLA 2025
  • Organizer, NEPLS at Northeastern, September 2024

Students and Collaborators

  • Cynthia Li, Ph.D. student
  • Emma Tosch, Ph.D. (research scientist, Northeastern University)
  • Luis Garcia (Ph.D. student, Northeastern University)
  • Chinmaya Dabral (Ph.D. student, NCSU)
  • Abhijeet Krishnan (Ph.D. student, NCSU; co-advised with Arnav Jhala)

Alumni

Featured Publications

Substructural Parametricity.
C. B. Aberlé, Chris Martens, and Frank Pfenning.
FSCD 2025. (DOI | ArXiv preprint).

Finite-Choice Logic Programming.
Chris Martens, Robert J. Simmons, and Michael Arntzenius.
POPL 2025, Denver, CO, January 2025. (ArXiV | DOI)

Modeling Game Mechanics with Ceptre.
Chris Martens, Alexander Card, Henry Crain, and Asha Khatri.
In IEEE Transactions on Games, July 2023.

Additional publications

Funded Projects

Explorable Formal Models of Privacy Policies and Regulations.
Funding source: NSF CAREER Award (2019-2024)
People: Emma Tosch, Luis Garcia, Chinmaya Dabral
Aims: We are developing techniques to represent privacy policies and regulations that are both formal and explorable, permitting users and policy crafters to answer 'what if'? questions about specific scenarios in addition to providing provable guarantees. We are formalizing privacy documents and scenarios using a relational programming model known as Answer Set Programming (ASP) as a lightweight semantic modeling framework, in which we have build a narrative planner that generates partial-ordered event structures from agent intentions and capabilities. We are augmenting ASP and narrative planning with support for answering queries, generating scenarios that reveal privacy loopholes, generating counterexamples to global correctness conditions, suggesting repairs for broken policies, and enabling the exploration of hypothetical scenarios by policy developers and users.

Formal Methods in Software Support for Sound Experimentation.
Funding source: NSF FMITF (2022-2026)
People: Emma Tosch (PI) (My role: co-PI)
Aims: This project will produce a high-level domain-specific language (DSL) for experimentation that enforces constraints on hypotheses, analyses, and treatment assignment according to the underlying principles of experimental design. Experiments written in this language will be correct by construction vis a vis consistency of hypotheses and treatment assignments with respect to their identifiable effects. The team will then integrate the experimentation DSL into legacy socio-technical software for education, leveraging existing support for gradual typing to implement an orthogonal type system for experimental interventions. To evaluate these tools and promote continued research around formal methods approaches to the experimentation-analysis pipeline, the team will build a publicly available searchable experiment repository.

Past projects

Notes, Slides, and Drafts

Recorded Talks

Elsewhere