Todd Millstein

Professor and Chair
UCLA Computer Science Department
476 Engineering VI
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1596
todd@cs.ucla.edu
[ overview | publications | students | courses | bio ]

Research Overview

I develop technology to make software systems more reliable.

For more than a decade I have focused much of my work on network verification: developing programming languages and software verification techniques to obtain provable guarantees on the security and reliability of computer networks. Our open source Batfish network configuration analyzer is used by major tech companies (e.g., ebay) to ensure the security and reliability of their networks; Batfish is the technology underlying Oracle Cloud's Network Path Analyzer tool for their customers; and Batfish is now becoming an AWS-managed open source project.

In my current research I'm continuing to work on network reliability, for example developing techniques for verifying and testing parts of the Domain Name System (DNS). Outside of networking, I'm working to reduce the burden of interactive program synthesis through lemma synthesis and developing scalable reasoning methods for probabilistic programming languages.

Recent Publications

Data-Driven Lemma Synthesis for Interactive Proofs  (OOPSLA 2022)
       Aishwarya Sivaraman, Alex Sanchez-Stern, Bretton Chen, Sorin Lerner, Todd Millstein

SCALE: Automatically Finding RFC Compliance Bugs in DNS Nameservers  (NSDI 2022)
       Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla, Ryan Beckett, Todd Millstein, George Varghese

How Complex is DNS?  (HotNets 2021)
       Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla, Ryan Beckett, Todd Millstein, George Varghese

Safe-by-default Concurrency for Modern Programming Languages  (TOPLAS)
       Lun Liu, Todd Millstein, Madanlal Musuvathi

more publications...

Ph.D. Students

Ana Brendel
Poorva Garg (co-advised with Guy Van den Broeck)
Rathin Singha (co-advised with George Varghese)
Alan Tang (co-advised with George Varghese)

Graduated Students

Courses

I regularly teach these courses:

CS30: Principles and Practices of Computing
an introduction to computing for computer-science majors with no prior programming experience

CS231: Types and Programming Languages
an introductory graduate course on programming language theory and static type systems

CS239: Current Topics in Programming Languages and Systems
a graduate research seminar with varying topics

Brief Biography

I joined the UCLA faculty in November 2003. I am also an Amazon Scholar. During my time at UCLA I have also been a Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Intentionet (team now at AWS), a Visiting Fellow at Princeton, a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, and an Academic Visitor at Oxford. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington Department of Computer Science, where I was a member of the Cecil group led by Craig Chambers. Before that, I was an undergraduate at Brown University, where I was advised by Paris Kanellakis and Pascal Van Hentenryck. I grew up in suburban Maryland, outside of Washington D.C.

My honors and awards include an NSF CAREER Award, a Most Influential PLDI Paper Award, an IEEE Micro Top Picks selection, the Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award from UCLA Engineering, best-paper awards from PLDI, OOPSLA, and SIGCOMM, a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant, an IBM Faculty Award, and a Facebook Research Award.