Todd Millstein

Professor
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. I also apply programming languages techniques to address reliability challenges in other domains. My SPLASH/OOPSLA 2024 keynote talk describes the underlying philosophy of my work and highlights examples that have had practical impact: Everything is a Program (even if it's not)

For more than a decade much of my work has focused on network verification: obtaining provable guarantees on the security and reliability of computer networks. Our open source Batfish network configuration analyzer is now managed by Amazon Web Services, is the technology underlying Oracle Cloud's Network Path Analyzer tool, is in production use by dozens of other companies, and is a platform for many academic research projects. Batfish was awarded the ACM SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award in 2025 in recognition of its impact.

In my current research I'm continuing to work on network reliability, for example developing techniques for scalable BGP policy verification and behavioral testing of protocol implementations. Outside of networking, I'm working to reduce the burden of interactive program verification through lemma synthesis and developing scalable reasoning methods for probabilistic programming languages.


Recent Publications

If layering is useful, why not sublayering?  (HotNets 2024)
       Rathin Singha, Rishabh Iyer, Charles Liu, Caleb Terrill, Todd Millstein, Scott Shenker, George Varghese

Bit Blasting Probabilistic Programs  (PLDI 2024)
       Poorva Garg, Steven Holtzen, Guy Van den Broeck, Todd Millstein

MESSI: Behavioral Testing of BGP Implementations  (NSDI 2024)
       Rathin Singha, Rajdeep Mondal, Ryan Beckett, Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla, Todd Millstein, George Varghese

more publications...

Ph.D. Students

Ana Brendel
Poorva Garg (co-advised with Guy Van den Broeck)
Rajdeep Mondal (co-advised with George Varghese)
Rathin Singha (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 and served as the Computer Science Department Chair from 2022-2025. 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, an ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential PLDI Paper Award, an ACM SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award, an IEEE Micro Top Picks selection, both the Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award (for junior faculty) and the Eon Instrumentation Inc. Excellence in Teaching Award (for senior faculty) 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.