Information Processing Techniques Office
Sanjai Narain, Ph.D., joined DARPA as a program manager in June 2026.
His areas of expertise are artificial intelligence, mathematical logic, formal verification, robotics, cyber-physical systems design, nonlinear optimization, network and cloud infrastructure synthesis, programming languages, discrete-event simulation, and electrical engineering. His research has been in collaboration with major academic and industrial partners, most recently, Princeton and Imperial College, London.
Prior to joining DARPA, he was a fellow and chief scientist at Peraton Labs (formerly Bellcore) and a research scientist at the RAND Corporation. He has 12 issued patents and 16 major publications. He has served on editorial boards and program committees of IEEE and ACM journals and conferences, on NSF panels, and on thesis committees at Princeton and Yale.
Narain's notable contributions include:
- A minimalist, linear quadratic regulator-based shipboard crane controller for safe material transfer on the high seas
- CNMA, a method for constrained nonlinear black-box optimization that combines neural networks, mixed-integer linear programming, and a learning-from-failure feedback loop to outperform Bayesian optimization
- Deformable connectors that transform a discrete-continuous optimization problem into a purely continuous one
- A science of configuration for the decentralized synthesis, optimal repair, and safe migration of network and cloud configurations; symbolic discrete-event simulation
- A low-cost method for evaluating the bandwidth supportable by a local phone loop; and an efficient method of lazy, or demand-driven, evaluation achieved not by changing efficient eager interpreters, but by changing the programming style
Education
- Ph.D., Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles
- M.S., Computer Science, Syracuse University
- B.Tech., Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi