Photo of Mara Downing

About

I am a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara, working on quantitative verification and testing of neural networks in the Verification Lab. I am currently in my fifth year of study in the PhD program, and have advanced to candidacy. Prior to my graduate studies at UCSB I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College in 2020.

My broad research interests are in all types of software verification, and I am currently working on projects to quantitatively verify robustness and safety of neural networks using techniques varying from symbolic execution and model counting to directed sampling and coverage-guided fuzzing.