Overview
I'm interested in understanding how agents make decisions, interact, and give rise to collective behavior, using theoretical and empirical approaches. My current research examines mechanisms underlying unintended behaviors (such as "reward hacking") in AI systems and their interactions. I'm increasingly interested in analogous questions in biology, particularly at the cellular and multicellular levels. More broadly, I'm interested in using a range of computational and quantitative approaches to understand both engineered and natural systems.
Interests include: algorithms, game theory, mechanism design, optimization, statistics, machine learning.
I'm advised by Dawn Song, and am affiliated with RDI & IC3. Normally I'm based in New York, where I spend time with DLI at Cornell Tech. I'll be visiting Penn for the Summer, working with Meena Jagadeesan.
My work has previously been supported by the Ethereum Foundation.
Background.
I started my PhD in 2022, interested primarily in security and privacy. In a past life I worked on analyzing and building distributed systems for machine learning and other domains at the AMPLab/RISELab with Ion Stoica and Joey Gonzalez.
I've been on leave working on a startup since 2023, but will be returning to grad school at some point in the near future.
Outside work. I like to box (prev: cal boxing '18), play soccer, watch basketball and take photos. These days I mostly just have time to read (especially history). Sometimes I help friends with an Indian food popup (follow @dononyc).
Publications
PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World
Kushal Babel, Nerla Jean-Louis, Yan Ji, Ujval Misra, Mahimna Kelkar, Kosala Yapa Mudiyanselage, Andrew Miller, Ari Juels. IEEE S&P 2026.
Specular: Towards Secure, Trust-minimized Optimistic Blockchain Execution
Zhe Ye*, Ujval Misra*, Jiajun Cheng, Wenyang Zhou, Dawn Song. IEEE S&P 2024.
Elastic Hyperparameter Tuning on the Cloud
Lisa Dunlap, Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Ujval Misra, Richard Liaw, Michael Jordan, Ion Stoica, Joseph E. Gonzalez. SoCC 2021.
RubberBand: Cloud-based Hyperparameter Tuning
Ujval Misra*, Richard Liaw*, Lisa Dunlap, Romil Bhardwaj, Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, Alexey Tumanov. EuroSys 2021.
Lineage Stash: Fault-tolerance Off the Critical Path
Stephanie Wang, John Liagouris, Robert Nishihara, Philipp Moritz, Ujval Misra, Alexey Tumanov, Ion Stoica. SOSP 2019.
Preprints
C5t5: Controllable Generation of Organic Molecules with Transformers
Daniel Rothchild, Alex Tamkin, Julie Yu, Ujval Misra, Joseph Gonzalez. arXiv preprint 2021.
