contact
Office: 266 CSL (Mail Code: 228),
1308 W. Main Street
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217 333 7824
Email: mitras AT illinois dot edu
Diana Scott
Office: CSL 251, MC-228
Email: dlscott AT illinois dot edu
Phone: 217 244 7171
Sayan Mitra [CV]
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Affiliate Professor, Computer Science
Director, Center for Autonomy
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Research. Autonomy and robotics, verification, hybrid systems.
Biosketch Sayan is a Professor and John Bardeen Faculty Scholar of ECE at UIUC. His research is on autonomy spanning theory and systems.
Sayan received his PhD from MIT with Nancy Lynch.
He wrote a textbook on verification of cyber-physical systems (MIT Press 2021).
The group's work has been recognized with NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Research Program Award, and several best paper awards.
Want to join our group? See this page.
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recent publication highlights
- Abstract Rendering: Certified Rendering Under 3D Semantic Uncertainty, Ji, Li, Zhong, Zhang, and Mitra. NeurIPS, 2025.
- Indistinguishability in Localization and Control with Coarse Information, Liberzon and Mitra. HSCC, 2025.
- Verifying cyber-physical system: A path to safe autonomy. [slides] Mitra. MIT Press, 2021.
- Verifying controllers with vision-based perception using safe approximate abstractions.Hsieh, Li, Sun, Joshi, Misailovic, and Mitra. EMSoft and IEEE TCAD, 2022. [Video]
- Formal methods for safe autonomy: Data-driven verification, synthesis, and applications Chuchu Fan , PhD thesis. Winner of ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2020!
current projects
- HYDDRA: Hybrid Dynamics - Deconstruction and Aggregation (AFOSR MURI)
- AVIATE: Center for Autonomous Vehicles in Air Transportation Engineering (NASA ULI)
- Visual Computing Meets Formal Verification: Certified Rendering, Geometry, and Video Generation (NSF FMitF) with Huan Zhang and Shenlong Wang.
- Safety of autonomous and learning enabled control systems (Boeing)
courses
- ECE484: Safe Autonomy (Spring 2026)
- ECE484: Principles of Safe Autonomy, Spring '20, Fall '20, Spring '22, Fall '22'(New and improved!)
- ECE/CS584: Embedded System Verification: Fall 2025, Fall 2021, Fall 2019
- ECE/CS498SM: Principles of Safe Autonomy, Spring 2019 (New!)
graduate students
- Yangge Li
- Yan Miao
- Chenxi Ji
- Alex Yuan
- Ege Yuceel
- Noah Giles
- Jai Anchalia
- Will Shen
- Abhishek Pai
phd alumni
- Kristina Miller (ECE 2024, now at Air Force Research Labs)
- Dawei Sun (ECE 2023, now at Byte Dance)
- Chiao Hsieh (CS 2023, now Project Assistant Professor at Kyoto University)
- Hussein Sibai (ECE 2021, now Assistant Professor at WashU)
- Ritwika Ghosh (CS 2020, now at Bodo.ai)
- Chuchu Fan (PhD ECE 2019, now Assistant Professor at MIT)
- Zhenqi Huang (PhD ECE 2016, now at Waymo)
- Sridhar Duggirala (PhD CS 2015, co-advised M. Viswanathan, now Assistant Prof. at UNC Chapel Hill)
- Taylor Johnson (PhD ECE 2013, now Associate Prof. at Vanderbilt U.)
masters alumni
- Daniel Zhuang (MCS, 2025)
- Akul Dutta (MS CS, May 2025)
- Benjamin C. Yang (MS MechSE, May 2024, first placement B Garage) thesis
- Katherine Braught (MS CS, May 2024, joined CS PhD program in Illinois) thesis
- Hongyi Li (MS ECE, 2023, first placement Beckman Institute Research Specialist) thesis
- Sumedh Raghoji (MS AE, 2023) thesis
- Haoqing (Steven) Zhu (MS CS, 2023, first placement Apple) thesis
- Minghao Jiang (ECE 2021, now at Meta)
- Tianqi (Ted) Liu (ECE 2020, now at Jump)
- Matthew Potok (MS ECE 2018, now at Aurora Flight Sciences)
- Bolun Qi (MS CS 2018, now at Facebook)
- Nicole Chan (MS ECE 2018, now at Pilot AI)
- Complete alumni list
undergraduate alumni
- Robert Azarcon (ECE, 2025)
- Yugal Kithany (ECE, 2025)
- Pranav Rajkumar (ECE, 2025)
- Eeshan Rajesh Zele (CS+Math, 2025)
- Jeeva Sundaram Murugan (BS, ECE 2024)
- Yubin Koh (BS, ECE 2023, PhD student at Purdue) News
- Yixuan Jia (BS ECE 2023, now grad student at MIT)
- Rahul Kajjam (BS, ECE 2023, now at Northrop Grumman)
- Daniel Wu (BS, ECE 2022, Grad student at GaTech)
- Complete alumni list
recent service commitments
- Steering committee member of HSCC (2020--)
- Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems
- ECE Associate Head of Grad Affairs (2023-24)
- NFM 2024, DAC 2024
- Elected Vice-chair of SIGBED (2022--2025)
- ICCPS 2022 (PC Co-chair with Nalini Venkatasubramanian),
- ICCPS 2021
- HSCC 2017 (PC Co-chair with Goran Frehse)