Rameez Wajid

Ph.D., Computer Science

University of Colorado Boulder

Boulder, CO

I build safety certificates for autonomous systems and make them checkable by machine. My work synthesizes barrier and Lyapunov certificates with sum-of-squares (SOS) programming, chains them into hierarchies that scale to harder systems, and repairs the solver’s floating-point output into exact machine-checkable certificates. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, advised by Prof. Sriram Sankaranarayanan, and collaborated with Toyota Research North America. You can try interactive versions of each project on my research page.

Before my Ph.D., I spent over a decade in aerospace simulation and autonomous systems, including acceptance testing of fielded systems, and taught avionics and control engineering at NUST. That experience drives my research, which aims for guarantees that hold on fielded systems, and my teaching, which links abstract ideas to actual systems.

I am on the 2026–27 academic job market for tenure-track faculty positions, and I am also open to research scientist and postdoctoral roles in formal verification for autonomous systems. I enjoy teaching across computer science and engineering (see my teaching page), and my research offers well-scoped projects for undergraduate and graduate students, from building controllers and simulations to writing machine-checkable proofs. Feel free to reach out by email.

Outside work, I spend time with my family in Boulder and on the tennis court whenever I can.

news

Nov 11, 2026	New research pages with interactive demos of successive barriers, repulsive barriers, successive CLFs and exact SOS certificate repair.
Jul 15, 2026	Our work titled “Control Barrier Functions for Moving Obstacles via Translational Symmetry” accepted as a regular paper at IEEE CDC 2026.
Jun 29, 2026	Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation titled, “Successive Control Certificates for Safe Autonomy” . Recording here
Feb 06, 2026	Presented a poster at the CU annual research expo titled SOS Certificate Repair via DSOS and Rational LP.
Nov 25, 2025	Organized the inaugural CUPLV Formal Methods Seminar and gave a talk on Verification of Real-valued Programs.

selected publications

CDC

Control Barrier Functions for Moving Obstacles via Translational Symmetry

Rameez Wajid, Georgios Fainekos, Bardh Hoxha, and 2 more authors

In IEEE 65th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2026

to appear

Code

HSCC

Successive Control Barrier Functions for Nonlinear Systems

Rameez Wajid and Sriram Sankaranarayanan

In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, HSCC 2025, Irvine, CA, USA, May 6-9, 2025, 2025

DOI Bib PDF Code

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/hybrid/Wajid025,
  author = {Wajid, Rameez and Sankaranarayanan, Sriram},
  title = {Successive Control Barrier Functions for Nonlinear Systems},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th {ACM} International Conference on Hybrid Systems:
                    Computation and Control, {HSCC} 2025, Irvine, CA, USA, May 6-9, 2025},
  pages = {21:1--21:11},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3716863.3718043},
  doi = {10.1145/3716863.3718043},
  timestamp = {Wed, 11 Jun 2025 01:00:00 +0200},
  biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/hybrid/Wajid025.bib},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
}

L4DC

Formal Synthesis of Safety Controllers for Unknown Stochastic Control Systems using Gaussian Process Learning

Rameez Wajid, Asad Ullah Awan, and Majid Zamani

In Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference, L4DC 2022, 23-24 June 2022, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, 2022

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/l4dc/WajidAZ22,
  author = {Wajid, Rameez and Awan, Asad Ullah and Zamani, Majid},
  editor = {Firoozi, Roya and Mehr, Negar and Yel, Esen and Antonova, Rika and Bohg, Jeannette and Schwager, Mac and Kochenderfer, Mykel J.},
  title = {Formal Synthesis of Safety Controllers for Unknown Stochastic Control
                    Systems using Gaussian Process Learning},
  booktitle = {Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference, {L4DC} 2022, 23-24 June
                    2022, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, {USA}},
  series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  volume = {168},
  pages = {624--636},
  publisher = {{PMLR}},
  year = {2022},
  timestamp = {Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100},
  biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/l4dc/WajidAZ22.bib},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
}