PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kenneth L. McMillan

Also known as Ken McMillan, K. L. McMillan, K. L. Mcmillan, K. McMillan, K.L. McMillan, K.L. Mcmillan

Kenneth McMillan is a professor of computer science at UT Austin, and his interests include applying automated verification to explainable AI. He earned a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon in 1992, and his thesis on symbolic model checking won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He shared the 1998 ACM Paris Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice, received a CAV Award in 2010, and joined UT Austin in 2021 after industry research at Microsoft Research and Amazon Web Services. In 2020 he posted an arXiv paper that adapts Craig interpolants to explain neural networks, and in 2025 he and Siyu Zhang posted work on attributions that preserve computational pathways. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2026.

Works
200
Citations
21,351
h-index
56

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1992

    A thesis on symbolic model checking

    He earns a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon in 1992, and his thesis on symbolic model checking wins the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

  2. 1998

    A Kanellakis Award for model checking

    He shares the 1998 ACM Paris Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice with Randal Bryant, Edmund Clarke, and E. Allen Emerson for work on symbolic model checking.

  3. 2010

    The CAV Award for scalable tools

    He receives the CAV Award in 2010 for fundamental contributions that advance the scalability of model checking tools.

  4. 2020

    Craig interpolants for neural networks

    He adapts the Craig interpolant from automated reasoning to explain neural-network inferences in an arXiv paper posted in April 2020.

  5. 2021

    Joining the UT Austin faculty

    He joins the computer science faculty at UT Austin in 2021, after industry research at Microsoft Research and Amazon Web Services.

  6. 2025

    Attributions that keep computational pathways

    He and Siyu Zhang post an arXiv paper in September 2025 that proposes activation preservation as a tractable proxy for preserving computational pathways.

  7. 2026

    A National Academy of Engineering election

    He is elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and UT Austin announces it in February 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    Admiral B.R. Inman Centennial Chair

    He is a professor of computer science at UT Austin and holds the Admiral B.R. Inman Centennial Chair in Computing Theory; his interests include the application of automated verification to explainable AI.

Sources and credits

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  1. Kenneth L. McMillan - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  2. Kenneth McMillan - The Mathematics Genealogy Project mathgenealogy.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  3. CAV Award | International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification i-cav.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  4. [2004.04198] Bayesian Interpolants as Explanations for Neural Inferences arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  5. Ken McMillan | UT Austin Computer Science cs.utexas.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.
  6. [2509.04588] Beyond Output Faithfulness: Learning Attributions that Preserve Computational Pathways arxiv.org. Checked 15 October 2026.
  7. Ken McMillan Elected to the National Academy of Engineering | UT Austin Computer Science cs.utexas.edu. Checked 15 October 2026.