Yiliang Liang

Welcome! I am a PhD student in the Software Societal Systems Department (S3D) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), advised by Prof. Eunsuk Kang and Prof. Joshua Sunshine. My research focuses on the intersection of formal methods, software engineering, and HCI, including making formal methods more approachable for stakeholders. In particular, I have been exploring the roles that visualizations play in helping stakeholders understand, debug, and communicate formal methods artifacts (PLATEAU'25, '26, and TOSEM'26).

Before CMU, I received my B.S. in Computer Science and Data Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. At CMU, I also worked on Penrose, a programming language and tool that turns plaintext declarative descriptions into beautiful diagrams, which I have been incorporating into my research on formal methods visualizations.

I am a commercial flight enthusiast. I enjoy flying on plane and taking unusual connecting itineraries. I treat flying as an optimization problem, especially in maximizing value out of airline / credit card points and designing complex itineraries that maximize exploration out of a fixed budget. Last year, I took two daytrips in two different Canadian cities in a single connecting itinerary when traveling between the U.S. and Europe. Check out my flight map here!

I also collecting things like boarding passes and passport stamps. My favorite was when I got a passport stamp when visiting Point Roberts, WA, USA, an interesting geographic oddity and a memorable stop. I also have a collection of boarding passes from my travels (and sometimes more than one boarding pass per flight), which I keep as mementos of my journeys.