Timothy Zhou
I’m a third-year PhD student in the ProgSys group at UCSD, advised by Loris D’Antoni and Nadia Polikarpova. My research focuses on building programming abstractions that make it easier to build robust software systems. Much of my work is motivated by the increasing role of LLMs in modern software. Examples of projects include:
- Language-Based Agent Control (NeurIPS 2026) is a framework for applying language-based security techniques off-the-shelf to code containing agentic components.
- ChopChop (POPL 2026) is a framework for defining streaming program analyses, which can analyze programs at the token level, as they are being written by an LLM.
In Summer 2026 I was an Applied Scientist intern in the Automated Reasoning Group at AWS. I did my undergrad at UIUC, where I was advised by Talia Ringer as part of the Illinois Theorem Provers Lab.
Contact me: ttzhou@ucsd.edu.
papers
(* = equal contribution)
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- ChopChop: a Programmable Framework for Semantically Constraining the Output of Language ModelsPOPL, 2026
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- Historiographer: Strongly-Consistent Distributed Reactive Programming with Minimal LockingSPLASH Student Research Competition (First Place), 2023
news
| Jun 14, 2026 | This summer I am an Applied Scientist Intern in the Automated Reasoning Group at AWS. |
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| Jan 12, 2026 | Presenting our work on ChopChop at POPL! |
| Sep 23, 2024 | I started my PhD at UCSD. |
| May 01, 2024 | I graduated from UIUC with degrees in Computer Science (Highest Honors) and Mathematics. |
| Oct 26, 2023 | Historiographer won first place at the SPLASH Student Research Competition (undergraduate divsion). |