Ti Zhou

Ph.D. candidate
Department of Computer Science
Stony Brook University (SBU)

Email: tizhou1 at cs dot stonybrook dot edu
Ti Zhou

I'm a CS PhD candidate at Stony Brook University (since Fall 2023), advised by Prof. Shuai Mu. My research spans two directions — pushing the verification frontier for real-world systems through new formal abstractions, and verifying generative-AI-produced artifacts through formal methods.

Before joining Stony Brook, I completed my M.Sc. (2023) and Honours B.Sc. (2021) in Computer Science at StFX University in Canada, where I was advised by Prof. Man Lin. I worked on designing and implementing reinforcement learning agents that run inside the Linux kernel for energy-efficient CPU frequency management.

I enjoy many forms of art, and I see computer systems as one of them. I do some painting.

Industry Experience

Applied Scientist Intern
Amazon AWS Security · 2026 – present
Formal-methods-driven evaluation of system code changes.

Selected Publications

Lion: Modular Verification of Async Runtime Liveness
T. Zhou, Z. Zhang, O. Chowdhury and S. Mu.
SOSP 2026. (62/390, 15.9% acceptance rate)ACM Artifacts Available badgeACM Artifacts Evaluated — Functional badgeACM Results Reproduced badge
Invited talk, New York University, October 23, 2026.
Recommended by the PC chairs for ACM TOCS.
Async runtime Logical Log abstraction Attaches to general system shapes Specifies both safety and liveness
AutoMan: Facilitating Verified Distributed Systems Development Through Automatic Code Generation and Manual Optimizations
Z. Zhang*, T. Zhou* (* co-1st authors), C. Jenkins, O. Chowdhury and S. Mu.
SOSP 2025. (65/368, 17.7% acceptance rate)ACM Artifacts Available badgeACM Artifacts Evaluated — Functional badgeACM Results Reproduced badge
Spec-to-implementation recovery DSL/transpilation/code generation Refinement-based verification
CPU Frequency Scheduling of Real-Time Applications on Embedded Devices with Temporal Encoding-based Deep Reinforcement Learning
T. Zhou and M. Lin.
Journal of Systems Architecture, 2023.
Neuro-symbolic system In-kernel agent

Students Mentored

Yitong Zhao · 2024 – 2025 · High School → Undergrad@UIUC

Xinyi Li · 2022 – 2024 · Undergrad@StFX → PhD@Dalhousie

Haoyu Wang · 2022 – 2024 · Undergrad@StFX → PhD@Dalhousie

I designed and led projects based on my M.Sc. thesis for Xinyi [PDF] and Haoyu [PDF], each of which led to a publication in IEEE Trans. on Sustainable Computing.

Service

Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Computers · 2026

Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing · 2025