Ben Wooding
Postdoctoral Scholar (Research) – Vanderbilt University
I am a Postdoc at the Institute for Convergent Software Integrated Systems (ICONS, formerly the Institute for Software Integrated Systems), Vanderbilt University, working in Taylor T. Johnson’s group. My research sits at the intersection of formal methods, machine learning and cyber-physical systems, with the goal of providing provable guarantees for how systems and models behave. These include, but are not limited to: robustness to perturbations, stability, safety, resilience, reachability, invariance, and fairness; both worst-case and probabilistic guarantees, and for systems with known or (aleatoric/epistemic) uncertain models.
I am a lead author of the open-source tools IMPaCT, PRoTECT, and TRUST, a contributor to NNV3 and n2v, and co-lead of the AINNCS category of the ARCH-COMP verification competition. I completed my PhD in formal methods for cyber-physical systems at Newcastle University in 2023, supervised by Sadegh Soudjani, and went on to hold an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Research Fellowship on reliable AI-enabled design of cyber-physical systems. During the fellowship, I was invited to present my research at several international universities.
I have contributed to the international academic community with published works, conference presentations, program committee memberships, and paper reviews. I am publicity chair for VNN-COMP 2026, a Program Committee member for FMAS 2026, and I contributed to a AAAI tutorial. Published works of particular note are conference works at ADHS, ATVA, CDC, ECC, HSCC, ICCPS, ICTAC, NeuS, QEST+FORMATS, SAIV, and the ARCH Competition, and journal works in NAHS and ES:WR&T. I contributed two chapters to the book Active Building Energy Systems: Operation and Control.
At Vanderbilt University, I have given a couple lectures for the Advanced Graduate Course: Automated Verification (CS6315). I attended the Academy of College Teaching (ACT 2026S) workshop series to prepare for college level teaching, and the Postdoctoral Mentoring Skills Workshop at Vanderbilt University. I have worked on the DAINS (Dependable AI for National Security) project, collaborating with the Air Force Research Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
At Newcastle University, I was the chair of AMBER (involved coordinating regular seminars), gave multiple internal research presentations, and assisted widely by teaching as a demonstrator and with marking. I have experience with supervising PhD, MSc and BSc student projects. Alongside these, I previously led the team for research communication and dissemination for the HyCoDeV Lab.
I completed an integrated Masters degree in Computer Science (Security and Resilience) with 1st Class Honours (2019) also at Newcastle University. For the project and dissertation, I received 92%.
Google Scholar
Funding & Awards
- EPSRC Doctoral Prize Research Fellowship, £93,000 [7% acceptance] (Nov 2023 – Nov 2025)
- A logic-based resilience metric for water resource recovery facilities chosen for the themed collection Highlights from Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology in 2024 [1 of 20 papers — 8.5% of eligible papers]
- EPSRC PhD Studentship, £68,362 (2019–2023) – funding secured by Sadegh Soudjani
- Newcastle University Sports Scholarship (2015–2020)
Workshop, Tutorial & Competition Organization
- ARCH-COMP 2026 – Category Co-Lead: Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network Control Systems (AINNCS) category of the ARCH friendly competition
- VNN-COMP 2026 – Publicity Chair: The Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP) – co-located with SAIV
- AAAI 2026 – Workshop Contributor: The Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP): A Lab for Benchmark Proposers, Verification Tool Participants, and the Broader AI Community – LH03
- CPS-IoT Week 2021 -Website Chair: Verification of Autonomous & Robotic Systems (VARS) Workshop
In-Person Invited Talks
- Max Planck Institute, Germany – Institute for Software Systems (SWS) – August 2025
- UC Louvain, Belgium – Cyber-Physical Systems lab – June 2025
- Newcastle University, UK – Open Research Conference – June 2025
- Vanderbilt University, USA – Institute for Convergent Software Integrated Systems (ICONS) – May 2025
- TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands – Control Systems Technology Group (CST) – Feb 2025
- Lancaster University, UK – School of Computing and Communications – Dec 2024
- Kings College London, UK – Software Systems Group (SSY) – Nov 2024
- Edinburgh University, UK – Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour (IPAB) – Nov 2024
- Durham University, UK – Scientific Computing Group (SciComp) – Nov 2024
- Newcastle University, UK – PARTNERS24 ‘Ask the Experts’ event – July 2024
Reviewing Activities
Formal Methods
Control
Machine Learning & AI
Autonomous Vehicles & Cyber-Physical Systems
Environment & Energy
Miscellaneous
Publications (Google Scholar)
| Title | Cited by | Year |
|---|---|---|
|
ARCH-COMP26 Category Report: Continuous and Hybrid Systems with Nonlinear Dynamics
L Geretti, JAD Sandretto, M Althoff, L Benet, P Collins, M Forets, S Mitsch, ... Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Applied Verification for …, 2026 |
2 | 2026 |
|
A Self-correcting Neuro-symbolic AI Reasoning Framework
B Wooding*, K Brennan*, AM Tumlin, H Zhang, TT Johnson International Symposium on AI Verification, 191-211, 2026 |
2026 | |
|
ARCH-COMP26 Category Report: Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network Control Systems (AINNCS) for Continuous and Hybrid Systems Plants
S Sasaki, B Wooding, TT Johnson, M Althoff, L Benet, S Coogan, M Forets, ... 13th International Workshop on Applied Verification for Continuous and …, 2026 |
2026 | |
|
k-Inductive Neural Barrier Certificates for Unknown Nonlinear Dynamics
B Wooding, H Zhang, TT Johnson, A Lavaei 3rd International Conference on Neuro-Symbolic Systems (NeuS), 2026 |
2026 | |
|
MetaMoE: Formal Verification of Compositional Robustness and Scalability of Mixture-of-Experts Architecture
Q Pham, B Wooding, L Nam, S Sasaki, TT Johnson International Symposium on AI Verification, 167-190, 2026 |
2026 | |
|
n2v: Neural Network Verification in Python (Competition Contribution)
S Sasaki, B Wooding, HD Wang, AM Tumlin, M Ma, TT Johnson International Symposium on AI Verification, 394-400, 2026 |
2026 | |
|
Reachability-Based Formal Verification of Graph Neural Networks with Node and Edge Features
AM Tumlin, B Wooding, Z Shao, DM Lopez, T Derr, TT Johnson International Symposium on AI Verification, 271-298, 2026 |
2026 | |
|
ARCH-COMP25 Category Report: Stochastic Models
A Abate, O Akbarzadeh, HAP Blom, S Haesaert, S Hassani, A Lavaei, ... 12th International Workshop on Applied Verification for Continuous and …, 2025 |
20 | 2025 |
|
PRoTECT: Parallelized ConstRuction of SafeTy BarriEr Certificates for Nonlinear Polynomial SysTems
B Wooding, V Horbanov, A Lavaei International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, 448-458, 2025 |
20 | 2025 |
|
A logic-based resilience metric for water resource recovery facilities
AS Laino, B Wooding, S Soudjani, RJ Davenport Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology 11 (2), 377-392, 2025 |
10 | 2025 |
|
PRoTECT: Parallel construction of barrier certificates for safety verification of polynomial systems
B Wooding, V Horbanov, A Lavaei Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 16th International Conference on Cyber-Physical …, 2025 |
6 | 2025 |
|
TRUST: StabiliTy and Safety ContRoller Synthesis for Unknown Dynamical Models Using a Single Trajectory
J Gardner*, B Wooding*, A Nejati, A Lavaei Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems …, 2025 |
4 | 2025 |
|
Proving the Correctness of CANDO3 Optrode Command Interface VDM model in Isabelle/HOL
L Freitas, B Wooding, B Scott, A Pollitt, P Degenaar Proceedings of the 23rd International Overture Workshop, 2025 |
2025 | |
|
Data-driven abstraction-based control synthesis
M Kazemi*, R Majumdar, M Salamati*, S Soudjani, B Wooding* Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems 52, 2024 |
53 | 2024 |
|
IMPaCT: Interval MDP Parallel Construction for Controller Synthesis of Large-Scale STochastic Systems
B Wooding, A Lavaei International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems and Formal …, 2024 |
13 | 2024 |
|
Data-driven abstractions via binary-tree Gaussian processes for formal verification
O Schön, S Naseer, B Wooding, S Soudjani 8th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS) 58 (11 …, 2024 |
9 | 2024 |
|
Learning k-inductive control barrier certificates for unknown nonlinear dynamics beyond polynomials
B Wooding, A Lavaei arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.07232, 2024 |
9 | 2024 |
|
IMPaCT: A parallelized software tool for IMDP construction and controller synthesis with convergence guarantees
B Wooding, A Lavaei Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems …, 2024 |
5 | 2024 |
|
Formal control of new England 39-bus test system: an assume-guarantee approach
B Wooding, A Lavaei, S Soudjani arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.03467, 2023 |
9 | 2023 |
|
Robust simulation functions with disturbance refinement
B Wooding, A Lavaei, V Vahidinasab, S Soudjani 2023 European Control Conference (ECC), 1-6, 2023 |
9 | 2023 |
|
Model-based and data-driven formal synthesis of power systems
BJ Wooding Newcastle University, 2023 |
1 | 2023 |
|
Arch-comp21 category report: Stochastic models
A Abate, H Blom, M Bouissou, N Cauchi, H Chraibi, J Delicaris, ... 8th International Workshop on Applied Verification of Continuous and Hybrid …, 2021 |
39 | 2021 |
|
Tuning Robotti: the machine-assisted exploration of parameter spaces in multi-models of a cyber-physical system
S Bogomolov, J Fitzgerald, FF Foldager, C Gamble, PG Larsen, K Pierce, ... Proceedings of the 18th International Overture Workshop, 50-64, 2021 |
6 | 2021 |
|
Operation and control of a population of active buildings at network level
B Wooding, V Vahidinasab, S Soudjani Active Building Energy Systems: Operation and Control, 193-218, 2021 |
3 | 2021 |
|
Control and management of active buildings
B Wooding, V Vahidinasab, M Kazemi, S Soudjani Active Building Energy Systems: Operation and Control, 161-192, 2021 |
2 | 2021 |
|
Cyber-Physical Smart Homes/Buildings
B Wooding, V Vahidinasab, S Soudjani Springer, 2021 |
2021 | |
|
Formal controller synthesis for frequency regulation utilising electric vehicles
B Wooding, V Vahidinasab, S Soudjani 2020 International Conference on Smart Energy Systems and Technologies (SEST …, 2020 |
13 | 2020 |
|
Using formal methods and proof to verify a cando epilepsy medical device
B Wooding Master's thesis, School of Computing, Newcastle University, UK (June 2019), 2019 |
7 | 2019 |
Updated daily from Google Scholar. See Publications for the full list.