Sriram Sankaranarayanan

Sriram Sankaranarayanan is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and also serves as Associate Dean for Digital Education in the College of Engineering and Applied Science. Since joining the faculty in 2009, he has built an internationally recognized research program that blends programming languages, formal methods, and control theory to reason about cyber-physical systems.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Stanford University, 2005 (advisers Zohar Manna & Henny Sipma)
• B.Tech., Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (President’s Gold Medal, 2000)

Research Interests:
Prof. Sankaranarayanan’s work centers on hybrid dynamical systems—models that capture discrete software interacting with continuous physical environments—and on developing formal-methods techniques for their verification, control, and synthesis. Specific themes include control-barrier & Lyapunov function synthesis, neural-network verification, stochastic-game models for human-autonomy interaction, and physics-informed machine learning. Application domains range from autonomous robotics and surgical-task planning to safety-critical medical devices such as the artificial pancreas.

Recent Publication Trends (2024-2025):
His latest papers advance safe control synthesis (successive control barrier functions, piecewise-affine Lyapunov functions) and trustworthy AI (Taylor-model enhanced physics-informed neural networks), while also exploring game-theoretic anticipation for robotic systems interacting with uncertain human operators.

Honors & Awards:

• NSF CAREER Award (2009)
• Siebel Scholar (2005)
• President’s Gold Medal, IIT Kharagpur (2000)
• CU Boulder Dean’s Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty (2012)
• CU Boulder Outstanding Teaching Award (2014)
• CU Boulder Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award (2014)
• Coursera Outstanding Innovation Award (2022)

Student Advising & Grants:
He has mentored numerous PhD students; recent graduates include Dr. Emily Jensen, Dr. Monal Narasimhamurthy, and Dr. Kandai Watanabe (2024). His group regularly publishes at top venues such as HSCC, POPL, PLDI, CAV, and WAFR, supported by NSF, NIH, and industry grants.

Group & Teaching:
Prof. Sankaranarayanan leads activities within the Programming Languages & Verification group and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on programming languages, algorithms, optimization, and formal methods. He is active in conference organization (e.g., PC Chair VMCAI 2025) and maintains open-source courseware and research notebooks on GitHub.