Pavithra Prabhakar | Professor

Peggy and Gary Edwards Chair in Engineering

Ph.D. - 2011, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Computer Science
M.S. - 2010, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Applied Mathematics
M.S. - 2006, Indian Institute of Science
Computer Science and Automation
B.Tech. - 2004, National Institute of Technology, Warangal
Computer Science and Engineering

Contact information

2176 Engineering Hall
785-532-7941
pprabhakar@k-state.edu
Personal Website

Professional experience

Dr. Pavithra Prabhakar is a professor of computer science, the Peggy and Gary Edwards Chair in Engineering, and the Director of the Center for Trustworthy AI-enabled Robotic and Autonomous Systems. She earned her doctorate in computer science and a master's degree in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, followed by postdoctoral position at Caltech, supported by the prestigious Center for Mathematics of Information fellowship. Dr. Prabhakar began her academic career at the IMDEA Software Institute in Spain and joined Kansas State University in 2015.

An internationally recognized expert on trust in AI-enabled autonomous, cyber-physical, and robotic systems, Dr. Prabhakar’s research spans applications in aerospace, automotive, and agricultural automation. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles, with several receiving invited presentations and best paper awards, leading KSU Computer Science Department to within top 20 in the area of embedded and real-time systems. Dr. Prabhakar's research has earned numerous national and international accolades, including the NSF CAREER Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, the Amazon Research Award, the NITW Distinguished Young Alumnus Award, the European Union's Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, and the Computing Research Association’s inaugural Future Leaders Cohort. She has also received invitations for visiting positions at the Toyota Technical Center, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Indian Institute of Science, where she held the Satish Dhawan Visiting Chair Professorship. Her research has been funded by NSF, ONR, NASA, USDA, the European Union, and Amazon.

Currently, Dr. Prabhakar is serving the National Science Foundation as a Program Director in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate as an IPA. In this role, she oversees and manages programs supporting research across Cyber-Physical Systems, Robotics, AI, and Formal Methods, handling a portfolio of over 200 projects and principal investigators with a total budget exceeding $100 million. She leads the Formal Methods in the Field (FMitF) program, is a founding program director for the Safe Learning Enabled Systems (SLES) program and is a cognizant program director for the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Foundational Research in Robotics (FRR) programs which are cross-cutting initiatives spanning the CISE and Engineering directorates. In addition, she oversees the formal methods and verification porfolio of the core program in the Software-Hardware Foundations cluster.

Research

Prabhakar’s main research interest is in formal analysis of intelligent, autonomous, and cyber-physical systems with emphasis on both foundational and practical aspects related to automated and scalable techniques for verification and synthesis of hybrid control systems. Her research borrows ideas from automata theory, control and dynamical systems theory, formal methods and logics. She has lead several project on safety analysis of cyber-physical systems, including novel methods that combine counter-example guided abstraction refinement and hybridization. She has pioneered a novel approach for stability analysis of hybrid control systems based on ideas from formal methods which has appeared in the form of several invited papers and best paper award nominations. She is currently pursuing projects on robust analysis and design of autonomous and cyber-physical systems with artificial intelligence and machine learning components and applications in automotive, aerospace and robotics systems, and agricultural automation.

Academic highlights

Prabhakar has authored more than 70 articles in peer-reviewed conferences and journals that include conferences in the areas of formal methods (CAV, TACAS, VMCAI), AI/ML (Neurips), cyber-physical systems (ACM/IEEE HSCC, EMSOFT, CDC, ACC) and controls journals (IEEE TAC). Her papers have been selected for a best paper honorable mention award from Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, best papers of MEMOCODE and invited papers at Allerton and American Control Conference. She has served on the program committees of several conferences including EMSOFT, HSCC, CAV, VMCAI, ACC, QEST, FORMATS, FSTTCS. She has been the organizer/chair of two Dagstuhl seminars, Design and Analysis of Robust Systems (DARS) workshop, Numerical Software Verification (NSV) workshop, CyPhy Workshop, and Verification Mentoring Workshop (VMW). Her research has been sponsored by EU, NSF, ONR, and USDA. She has been awarded a Sohaib and Sara Abbasi fellowship from UIUC, an M.N.S Swamy medal from the Indian Institute of Science, a CMI postdoctoral fellowship from Caltech, a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Union, Michelle Munson-Serban Simu Keystone Research Faculty Scholarship from the College of Engineering, an NSF CAREER Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and an Amazon Research Award.