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 an associate professor in the department of computer science. She holds a Michelle Munson-Serban Simu Keystone Research Faculty Scholarship from the College of Engineering. She obtained her doctorate in computer science and a master's degree in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, followed by a CMI postdoctoral fellowship for a year at the California Institute of Technology. Prior to coming to K-State, she spent four years at the IMDEA Software Institute in Spain as a tenure-track assistant research professor. She previously interned at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, while working toward her doctorate.

Research

Prabhakar’s main research interest is in formal analysis of 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 applications in automotive, aerospace and robotics systems.

Academic highlights

Prabhakar has authored more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed conferences and journals that include formal methods conferences (CAV, TACAS, VMCAI), hybrid/control systems conferences (ACM/IEEE HSCC, EMSOFT, CDC, ACC) and controls journals (IEEE TAC). Her work has attracted more than 400 citations with an h-index of 13 and i10-index of 15. 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 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, a summer faculty fellowship from AFRL, an NSF CAREER Award and an ONR Young Investigator Award.