Jocelyn (Qiaochu) Chen

I am a Faculty Fellow at NYU Courant and an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta starting Summer 2025. I obtained my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin with Isil Dillig and Greg Durrett. I do research on program synthesis. I am also doing part-time at Nectry.

Email: qc1127 [at] cs.nyu.edu | Office: 60 5th Ave, Room 418 | Twitter | Google Scholar

I am planning to recruit MS/PhD students to begin their studies in Fall 2025 at the University of Alberta.

Please take a look at my research interests below and Notes to Prospective Students if any of these questions interests you as well.

Research Interests

My current research interests revolve around the following key questions in AI-assisted programming:

• How can we leverage state-of-the-art machine learning models to create new programming abstractions? How can we leverage symbolic and neural techniques to synthesize programs in a correct, scalable, user-friendly way?

• What are the right abstractions for programming tasks involving Large Language Model (LLM) invocations?

• How can we effectively integrate programming interfaces with program synthesizers?

Publications

• PhotoScout: Synthesis-Powered Multi-Modal Image Search. Celeste Barnaby, Jocelyn Chen, Chenglong Wang, Isil Dillig. CHI 2024.
• Satisfiability-Aided Language Models Using Declarative Prompting. Xi Ye, Jocelyn Chen, Isil Dillig, Greg Durrett. Neurips 2023. Code
• Data Extraction via Semantic Regular Expression Synthesis. Jocelyn Chen, Arko Banerjee, Çağatay Demiralp, Greg Durrett, Isil Dillig. OOPSLA 2023. Code
• ImageEye: Batch Image Processing Using Program Synthesis. Celeste Barnaby, Jocelyn Chen, Roopsha Samanta, Isil Dillig. PLDI 2023. Code
• Type-Directed Synthesis of Visualizations from Natural Language Queries. Jocelyn Chen, Shankara Pailoor, Celeste Barnaby, Abby Criswell, Chenglong Wang, Greg Durrett, Isil Dillig. OOPSLA 2022. Code
• Optimal Neural Program Synthesis from Multimodal Specifications. Xi Ye, Jocelyn Chen, Isil Dillig, Greg Durrett. Findings of EMNLP 2021.Code
• Web Question Answering with Neurosymbolic Program Synthesis. Jocelyn Chen, Aaron Lamoreaux, Xinyu Wang, Greg Durrett, Osbert Bastani, Isil Dillig. PLDI 2021. Code.Presentation
• Sketch-driven Regular Expression Generation from Natural Language and Examples. Xi Ye, Jocelyn Chen, Xinyu Wang, Isil Dillig, Greg Durrett. TACL 2020. Code
• Benchmarking Multimodal Regex Synthesis with Complex Structures. Xi Ye, Jocelyn Chen, Isil Dillig, Greg Durrett. ACL 2020. Code
• Multi-modal Synthesis of Regular Expressions. Jocelyn Chen, Xinyu Wang, Xi Ye, Greg Durrett, Isil Dillig. PLDI 2020. Code.Presentation

Teaching

• Fall 2024: CSCI-UA.0202(-003): Operating Systems

Notes to Prospective Students

If you're interested in working with me, please send an email with the subject line "Fall 25 Prospective Student". I may not be able to respond to all individual inquiries about research opportunities or admissions.

Apply to the UAlberta MSc/PhD program and mention my name in your application. Find the department application instructions here. The application deadline is December 15, 2024.

Please understand that I will only arrange conversations with potential candidates after I have reviewed their applications in our system. This ensures that I have a comprehensive understanding of each candidate's background and research interests before our discussion.

Scheduling

To make scheduling easier, my availability can be viewed on my public calendar.
Important: Please refrain from scheduling a meeting unless we have mutually agreed to meet beforehand. This ensures efficient use of our time and prevents any misunderstandings.