Samuel Judson

sam@sjudson.com

I work at Nexus on verifiable computation and its applications to transparent and accountable computing. I also occasionally write humor.

I recevied a doctorate from the Department of Computer Science at Yale University, where I was advised by Ruzica Piskac. I worked on finding new ways to use formal methods and applied cryptography to further principled governance of technology. My technical research focused on accountability for algorithmic decision making through the descriptive application of rigorous program analysis, as well as on privacy preserving formal methods. I also studied — and continue to work on — questions at the intersection of computer science with law and policy, especially those pertaining to accountability.

For my graduate research I received a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Before that I received my undergraduate degree from Marlboro College, advised by Jim Mahoney and Matt Ollis, where my Plan of Concentration focused on cryptographic authentication.


dblp | google scholar | github


Research Publications & Preprints

(*equal contribution)

  1.    'Put the Car on the Stand': SMT-based Oracles for Investigating Decisions [acm dl] [pdf]

    Samuel Judson, Matthew Elacqua, Filip Cano, Timos Antonopoulos, Bettina Könighofer,


         Scott J. Shapiro, and Ruzica Piskac


    CSLAW, 2024.


         also arXiv.2305.05731, 2023 [arxiv] [pdf]

  2.    Ou: Automating the Parallelization of Zero-Knowledge Protocols [acm dl] [pdf]

    Yuyang Sang*, Ning Luo*, Samuel Judson, Ben Chaimberg, Timos Antonopoulos, Xiao Wang,


         Ruzica Piskac, and Zhong Shao


    CCS, 2023.


         also Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2023/657 [eprint] [pdf]

  3.    Formal XAI via Syntax-Guided Synthesis [springer] [pdf]

    Katrine Bjørner*, Samuel Judson*, Filip Cano, Drew Goldman, Nicholas Shoemaker,


         Ruzica Piskac, and Bettina Könighofer


    AISoLA, 2023.


  4.    Analyzing Intentional Behavior in Autonomous Agents Under Uncertainty [ijcai] [pdf]

    Filip Cano Córdoba, Samuel Judson, Timos Antonopoulos, Katrine Bjørner, Nicholas Shoemaker,


         Scott J. Shapiro, Ruzica Piskac, and Bettina Könighofer


    IJCAI, 2023.


         also arXiv.2307.01532, 2023 [arxiv] [pdf]

  5.    On Heuristic Models, Assumptions, and Parameters

    Samuel Judson and Joan Feigenbaum


    Under Submission.


       also arXiv.2201.07413, 2022 [arxiv] [pdf]

  6.    ppSAT: Towards Two-Party Private SAT Solving [usenix] [pdf]

    Ning Luo, Samuel Judson, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac, and Xiao Wang


    USENIX Security, 2022.


         also Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2021/1584 [eprint] [pdf]

  7.    Privacy Preserving CTL Model Checking through Oblivious Graph Algorithms [acm dl] [pdf]

    Samuel Judson, Ning Luo, Timos Antonopoulos, and Ruzica Piskac


    WPES@CCS, 2020.


Theses



  1.    (Private) Formal Methods for Rigorously Governable Systems

    Doctoral Dissertation, Yale University, 2024.

  2.    Authentication: Techniques and Theory [marlboro] [pdf]

    Plan of Concentration (Undergraduate Thesis), Marlboro College, 2016.