The fellowship award covers all tuition and fees for two academic years, provides a $28,000 annual stipend and a travel fund for awardees to attend professional conferences.
Padhi is in his third year at UCLA and is advised by Professor Todd Millstein. Padhi’s research is aimed at providing software programmers with practical solutions to guarantee their software is indeed doing what it is supposed to. This is known as software verification. Specifically, he’s looking to make this process more interactive using machine learning and other techniques. Last year, Padhi spent six months as an intern at Microsoft’s PROSE group, where he worked on automatically learning structural patterns in data.
Padhi is the fourth UCLA student to receive this prestigious fellowship. Electrical engineering graduate student Salma Elmalaki, advised by Professor Mani Srivastava, was a recipient in 2016.