About Me
Hi, I’m Aaron and I’m a PhD student and research assistant at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I’m working in Professor Vikram Adve’s group, on program synthesis for domain-specific languages. I’m also interested in compilers and programming languages for heterogenous parallel programming and have research experience in parallel programming and extensible languages.
My primary interests are: automata theory, program synthesis, and programming languages.
Education
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
PhD Computer Science
2021-Present
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
BS Computer Science, summa cum laude
2017-2021
Research
Verified LLM-Generated Code
2025
Aaron Councilman, David Fu, Aryan Gupta, Chengxiao Wang, David Grove, Yu-Xiong Wang, Vikram Adve. 2025. Towards Formal Verification of LLM-Generated Code from Natural Language Prompts. arXiv:2507.13290.
Hardware-Agnostic Programming of Heterogeneous Systems
Russel Arbore, Aaron Councilman, Xavier Routh, Ryan Ziegler, Praneet Rathi, Vikram Adve. 2025. Hercules: A Compiler for Productive Programming of Heterogeneous Systems. arXiv:2503.10855.
Adel Ejjeh, Aaron Councilman, Akash Kothari, Maria Kotsifakou, Leon Medvinsky, Abdul Rafae Noor, Hashim Sharif, Yifan Zhao, Sarita Adve, Sasa Misailovic, Vikram Adve. 2022. HPVM: Hardware-Agnostic Programming for Heterogeneous Parallel Systems. IEEE Micro, 42(5). https://doi.org/10.1109/MM.2022.3186547.
Adel Ejjeh, Leon Medvinsky, Aaron Councilman, Hemanh Nehra, Suraj Sharma, Vikram Adve, Luigi Nardi, Eriko Nurvitadhi, and Rob Rutenbar. 2022. HPVM2FPGA: Enabling True Hardware-Agnostic FPGA Programming. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (ASAP). https://doi.org/10.1109/ASAP54787.2022.00012.
Aaron Councilman. 2021. An Extensible Implementation-Agnostic Parallel Programming Framework for C in ableC. Bachelor’s Thesis. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. https://hdl.handle.net/11299/220246.
Extensible Parallel Programming
2019
Aaron Councilman. 2019. Extensible Parallel Programming in ableC. Technical Report. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. https://hdl.handle.net/11299/203190.
Travis Carlson, Ciaradh Coomey, Aaron Councilman, Stephen Patrick, and Eric Van Wyk. 2019. An Investigation of Composable Language Extensions for Parallel Programming. Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technical Report 19-001. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216034.
Teaching
Compiler Construction
Graduate Teaching Assistant, 2022
Updated and modified old assignments and created new assignments for the course. Delivered five classes of lectures, coving topics related to Global Dataflow Analysis.
Introduction to Machine Architecture and Organization
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, 2019
Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, 2018
Work Experience
Software Development Engineer Intern
Amazon Music
2020
A Little More About Me
In addition to my interests in computer science, some of my other interests and hobbies are:
- Dancing (especially Jazz and Tap)
- TTRPGs
- Cooking
- Photography, for example
