About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the CS department at the University of Maryland, also affiliated with the Maryland Cybersecurity Center and UMIACS.

My research interests are in programming languages, formal methods, and systems for non-traditional computing platforms, broadly speaking. I want to provide the formal models, enforcement mechanisms, and language abstractions necessary for designing emerging computing platforms to meet well-defined correctness and security guarantees from the ground up, allowing programmers to unlock the full potential of their system without compromising trustworthiness. Check out the PLUM lab to learn more about PL research at UMD: PLUM.

I am always interested in working with motivated Masters and Ph.D. students who share a demonstrable interest in PL/Architecture/Security challenges. I’m generally happy to work with UMD undergrads as well, if they have taken one of my courses or attended one of my talks.

Previously, I was a PhD student in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, co-advised by Brandon Lucia and Limin Jia. My research focused on designing formally correct intermittent systems for energy-harvesting devices. I leveraged formal correctness reasoning to provide practical tools and systems that guarantee intermittent computing applications for these devices would run correctly.

I am honored to have received the CyLab Presidential Fellowship in 2021. More recently, I won first place in the PLDI 22 SRC for my work on creating a type system for reasoning about correct intermittent execution, and I was selected as a 2022 Rising Star in EECS

Contact: milijana at umd dot edu

If you are a student interested in working with me, be sure to make any emails short and specific as to how your past experiences overlap with my research interests.

Publications

Milijana Surbatovich, Naomi Spargo, Limin Jia, and Brandon Lucia. 2023. A Type System for Safe Intermittent Computing. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 7, PLDI, Article 136 (June 2023), 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3591250 Link to paper

Farzaneh Derakhshan, Myra Dotzel, Milijana Surbatovich, and Limin Jia. 2023. Modal Crash Types for Intermittent Computing. In ESOP 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13990. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30044-8_7

Emily Ruppel, Milijana Surbatovich, Harsh Desai, Kiwan Maeng and Brandon Lucia. 2022. An Architectural Charge Management Interface for Energy-Harvesting Systems. 55th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2022, pp. 318-335, doi: 10.1109/MICRO56248.2022.00034 Link to paper

Milijana Surbatovich, Limin Jia, and Brandon Lucia. 2021. Automatically enforcing fresh and consistent inputs in intermittent systems. Proceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3453483.3454081 Link to paper

Milijana Surbatovich, Limin Jia, and Brandon Lucia. 2020. Towards a Formal Foundation of Intermittent Computing. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 4, OOPSLA, Article 163 (November 2020), 31 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3428231 Link to paper Slides (as pdf)

Camille Cobb, Milijana Surbatovich, Anna Kawakami, Mahmood Sharif, Lujo Bauer, Anupam Das, Limin Jia. 2020. How Risky Are Real Users’ IFTTT Applets? USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2020). Link to paper

Milijana Surbatovich, Limin Jia, and Brandon Lucia. 2019. I/O dependent idempotence bugs in intermittent systems. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 3, OOPSLA, Article 183 (October 2019), 31 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3360609 Link to paper Slides (as powerpoint)

Milijana Surbatovich, Jassim Aljuraidan, Lujo Bauer, Anupam Das, and Limin Jia. 2017. Some Recipes Can Do More Than Spoil Your Appetite: Analyzing the Security and Privacy Risks of IFTTT Recipes. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW ‘17). 1501-1510. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3038912.3052709 Link to paper

Education

• Carnegie Mellon University: 2017 - 2023: PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering. Master’s degree awarded May 2020.
• University of Rochester, 2013-2017: B.S. in Computer Science, Summa cum laude, minor in Russian.

Teaching

• CMSC 838N - Language-based Security (Fall 2024)
• CMSC 838L - Programming Languages and Computer Architecture (Spring 2024)

Service

Program commitees:

• 2025: ESOP, HPCA, OOPSLA