Osbert Bastani

Osbert Bastani serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He leads the trustml@Penn research group and holds affiliations with the ASSET, PRECISE, and PRiML research centers, as well as PLClub. His academic work centers on developing reliable and interpretable artificial intelligence systems through interdisciplinary approaches combining programming languages, formal methods, and machine learning.

He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University under the guidance of Alex Aiken, followed by a postdoctoral position at MIT working with Armando Solar-Lezama. This foundation in both theoretical computer science and practical systems has shaped his research trajectory.

Bastani's primary research areas include Trustworthy Machine Learning (focusing on robustness against adversarial attacks, fairness in algorithmic decision-making, and explainable AI), program synthesis, and formal verification. His recent publications address critical challenges in large language models, such as defending against jailbreaking attacks and ensuring trustworthy retrieval-augmented generation. He also develops methods for conformal prediction under distribution shifts and neurosymbolic program synthesis for complex tasks like web question answering.

His teaching portfolio features advanced courses including CIS 7000: Trustworthy Machine Learning and CIS 4190/5190: Applied Machine Learning, where he integrates cutting-edge research into the curriculum. Through his research group, he mentors graduate students on projects spanning neurosymbolic programming, uncertainty quantification, and fairness in sequential decision-making.

As an active member of Penn's research ecosystem, Bastani contributes to the ASSET center's mission of building secure systems, PRECISE's work on cyber-physical systems, and PRiML's machine learning initiatives, while collaborating with PLClub on programming language innovations.