I am a PhD candidate at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California. I work at the DesCyPhy lab with Prof. Pierluigi Nuzzo. My research interest is the design, analysis and verification of safe, reliable and robust AI-enabled cyber-physical systems.  I work with mathematical formalisms termed 'contracts' to ensure compositional, correct-by-construction design of mission-critical and safety-critical CPSs like autonomous vehicles and unmanned aircraft.

A list of my publications (published, submitted or in prep.) is given below. 

Education

• Ph.D. from the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California (August 2018 -- ongoing)

• M.S in Electrical Engineering from the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California (August 2018-May 2020)

• Bachelor of Technology (Hons.) in Instrumentation Engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India (August 2014-May 2018). 

List of Publications

1.  "Control Barrier Function Contracts for Vehicular Mission Planning Under Signal Temporal Logic Specifications", Muhammad Waqas, Nikhil Vijay Naik and Pierluigi Nuzzo, in prep. 

2. "Robustness Contracts for Scalable Verification of Neural Network-Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems", Nikhil Vijay Naik, Kevin Chang, Yifeng Xiao and Pierluigi Nuzzo, in prep. 

3. "Contract-Based Hierarchical Modeling and Traceability of Heterogeneous Requirements ", Nikhil Vijay Naik, Alessandro Pinto and Pierluigi Nuzzo, accepted to appear at the ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), 2024.

4. "Distilled Approximations to Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Controllers", Nathan Dahlin, Krishna Kalagarla, Nikhil Vijay Naik, Rahul Jain and Pierluigi Nuzzo, available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14785 

5. "Contract-Based Control Synthesis with Barrier Functions for Vehicular Mission Planning", Muhammad Waqas, Nikhil Vijay Naik and Pierluigi Nuzzo, 61st IEEE conference on Decision and Control, Deccember 2022 (CDC-2022). 

6. "ARACHNE: Automated Validation of Assurance Cases with Stochastic Contract Networks", Chanwook Oh, Nikhil Vijay Naik, Zamira Daw, Timothy E. Wang and Pierluigi Nuzzo, 41st International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security (SAFECOMP-2022).

7. "Designing Interpretable Approximations to Deep Reinforcement Learning with Soft Decision Trees", Nathan Dahlin, Rahul Jain, Chaitanya Kalagarla, Nikhil Naik and Pierluigi Nuzzo, Reinforcement Learning for Real Life Workshop, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2021 

8. "Robustness Contracts for Scalable Verification of Neural Network-Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems", Nikhil Naik and Pierluigi Nuzzo, 18th ACM-IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for System Design (MEMOCODE-2020) (Best Paper Award) 

9. "A Joint Deconvolution Algorithm to Combine Single Dish And Interferometer Data For Wideband MultiTerm Imaging", U. Rau, Nikhil Naik and Timothy Braun, The Astronomical Journal, Vol. 158, No. 1 (June 2019) 

Professional Experience

• Served as Teaching Assistant under Prof. Pierluigi Nuzzo for the course: Mathematical Foundations of System Design: Modeling, Analysis and Synthesis (EE-581) at USC (Fall 2020 and Fall 2022)

• Research Intern at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA in Summer 2023.

• Formal Methods Research Intern at the Raytheon Technologies Research Corporation (RTRC, formerly UTRC) at Berkeley, CA in Summer 2020 and 2022.

• Student Member of the IEEE.