Steven Holtzen

Email: s.holtzen@northeastern.edu

Office: West Village H Room 320

Address:
Northeastern University
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
320 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). Brief biography.

I like designing systems that make probabilistic modeling fast, accessible, and useful for solving every-day reasoning tasks. My research focuses on:

The design and implementation of probabilistic programming languages, see here for a representative paper. I have taught several courses on this topic, including a recorded summer school series and a semester-long course for undergraduates with detailed course notes.
Formal methods for probabilistic systems, including probabilistic separation logics and program semantics.
Applications of probabilistic programming to domains like hardware reliability and differential privacy.

I regularly teach courses on programming languages; see here for a recent offering.

Sep 25, 2026: I was quoted in Business Insider on my former undergraduate advisee Noah Shinn’s work on Instinct. Congrats Noah!
Sep 14, 2026: I am giving a keynote at the GRAINS workshop.
Aug 17, 2026: I gave a keynote at the Workshop on Tractable Probabilistic Modeling (TPM) at UAI 2026 in Amsterdam. A recording of the talk is available.
Aug 5, 2026: New funding: our team was selected to participate in the DARPA CLARA program.
Jul 17, 2026: Huge congratulations to my first PhD student to graduate, Sam Stites! He will start as an assistant teaching professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
May 27, 2026: Categorical Semantics of Probabilistic Symbolic Execution received a distinguished paper award at PLDI 2026! Congratulations John and Jack!
May 11, 2026: I will be lecturing at French Spring School in Theoretical Computer Science École de Printemps d’Informatique Théorique (EPIT) on probabilistic programming languages.
Apr 30, 2026: Congratulations John on his accepted PLDI paper “Categorical Semantics of Probabilistic Symbolic Execution”.
May 1, 2025: Roulette accepted to PLDI 2025.
Mar 5, 2025: Congratulations Sam and John on the accepted OOPSLA paper Multi-Language Probabilistic Programming, and congratulations Minsung and John on his accepted OOPSLA paper Scaling Optimization Over Uncertainty via Compilation!