My name is Chris Watson and I'm a fourth year Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am very fortunate to be advised by Rajeev Alur and Dinesh Jayaraman.
I work at the intersection of Robot Learning and Formal Methods. I study how human-provided and autonomously-discovered task structure can work together to scaffold effective learning. Ideally, a human would be able to specify a robot's task in a way that is intuitive, flexible enough to allow let the robot customize its approach to its unique capabilities, and exposes structure within the task to facilitate efficient learning. Oftentimes, a lot of the most interesting and useful task structure is not obvious to humans and must be discovered by the robot during learning. My research focus is to develop forms of specification that leave room for the robot to add its own learned information, learning algorithms that let the robot discover task structure from firsthand experience, training methodologies that harmoniously combine both sources of structure.
I am a proud member of Penn's PLClub and the ASSET center (where I was recently featured in an article that describes our goal of safe, explainable, and trustworthy AI!).
Scenario-based Compositional Verification of Autonomous Systems with Neural Perception. Christopher Watson, Rajeev Alur, Divya Gopinath, Ravi Mangal, and Corina Păsăreanu. SAIV 2025.
Illustrated Landmark Graphs for Long-horizon Policy Learning. Christopher Watson, Arjun Krishna, Rajeev Alur, and Dinesh Jayaraman. TMLR 2025 (also workshop version at LEAP @ CORL 2024).
Formal Verification Techniques for Vision-Based Autonomous Systems - A Survey. Sayan Mitra, Corina Păsăreanu, Pavritha Prabhakar, Sanjit Seshia, Ravi Mangal, Yangge Li, Christopher Watson, Divya Gopinath, and Huafeng Yu. Principles of Verification: Cycling the Probabilistic Landscape. Essays Dedicated to Joost-Pieter Katoen on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday. 2024.
Stream Types. Joseph W. Cutler, Christopher Watson, Emeka Nkurumeh, Phillip Hilliard, Harrison Goldstein, Caleb Stanford, Benjamin C. Pierce. PLDI 2024.
A Robust Theory of Series-Parallel Graphs. Rajeev Alur, Caleb Stanford, and Christopher Watson. POPL 2023.
CS 4810: Introduction to Theory of Computing. Cornell University. Fall 2019.
CIS 5110: Theory of Computation. University of Pennsylvania. Fall 2022.
CIS 6730: Computer-Aided Verification. University of Pennsylvania. Spring 2023.
I've had the pleasure of being a student volunteer at POPL'22 and CCC'22, and of being a student at SSFT'22 and OPLSS'22.
ccwatson at seas dot upenn dot edu