Jackson's Homepage

whoami

I'm a second-year PhD student in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am "watched" by my advisor Tianyin Xu.

I'm currently building SREGym to see if AI can resolve production incidents. SREGym is part of Laude Slingshots // TWO. See my interview with Andy Konwinski and a brief demo.

My research explores practical AI and agent techniques for safety-critical computer systems and infrastructures. My current work is in the AIOps space, specifically in AI for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Previously, I collaborated with Microsoft Research and IBM Research to build LLM benchmarks (AIOpsLab, ITBench) and agents (STRATUS) for SRE.

In the past, I worked at NASA in the Space Technology Mission Directorate, where I helped develop space systems for the International Space Station. I'm also an instructor at the Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois, where I teach a professional development class on Data Science to CPS high school teachers.

News

Apr 2026 Joining Microsoft Research as a research intern.
Oct 2025 Awarded a Laude Institute Slingshot grant for SREGym.
Sep 2025 STRATUS accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
May 2025 ITBench selected for Oral Presentation (Top 1%) at ICML 2025.
Aug 2024 Started my PhD at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, UIUC.

Publications

NeurIPS 2025

STRATUS: A Multi-agent System for Autonomous Reliability Engineering of Modern Clouds. Yinfang Chen*, Jiaqi Pan*, Jackson Clark*, Yiming Su*, Noah Zheutlin, Bhavya Bhavya, Rohan Arora, Yu Deng, Saurabh Jha, Tianyin Xu. [abs] [pdf] * = primary author

BibTeX

@inproceedings{chen2025stratus,
  title     = {{STRATUS}: A Multi-agent System for Autonomous Reliability Engineering of Modern Clouds},
  author    = {Chen, Yinfang and Pan, Jiaqi and Clark, Jackson and Su, Yiming and Zheutlin, Noah
               and Bhavya, Bhavya and Arora, Rohan and Deng, Yu and Jha, Saurabh and Xu, Tianyin},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year      = {2025},
  eprint    = {2506.02009},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.DC}
}

ICML 2025

ITBench: Evaluating AI Agents across Diverse Real-World IT Automation Tasks. Saurabh Jha, Rohan Arora, Yuji Watanabe, Takumi Yanagawa, Yinfang Chen, Jackson Clark et al. In Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'25), Vancouver, Canada, July 2025. [abs] [pdf]

Selected for Oral Presentation (Top 1%), Spotlight Poster

BibTeX

@inproceedings{jha2025itbench,
  title     = {{ITBench}: Evaluating {AI} Agents across Diverse Real-World {IT} Automation Tasks},
  author    = {Jha, Saurabh and Arora, Rohan and Watanabe, Yuji and Yanagawa, Takumi
               and Chen, Yinfang and Clark, Jackson and others},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year      = {2025},
  address   = {Vancouver, Canada},
  note      = {Oral Presentation (Top 1\%)}
}

Invited Talks

SREGym. Microsoft Research, System Intelligence Seminar. Redmond, WA. Summer 2026.
STRATUS. University of Toronto, ECE1770. Hosted by Yifang Tian and Hans-Arno Jacobsen. March 17, 2026.

Tutorials

I have been giving many tutorials on AIOps and SRE agent research.

An open platform for AI-driven systems research on cloud system management (ITBench Tutorial) SOSP 2025
Benchmarking of AI Agents for IT Automation Tasks using ITBench DSN 2025
AIOpsLab in Action: An Open Platform for AIOps Research FSE 2025
Benchmarking of AI Agents for IT Automation Tasks using ITBench IIDAI Workshop Spring 2025

Mentoring

Saad Mohammad Rafid Pial — Research intern at UIUC (BSc, BUET). Working on AI for SRE and cloud reliability.
Lily Gniedziejko — Undergraduate, Computer Science, UIUC.

Awards

Slingshot Grant from Laude Institute for SREGym, 2025

Service

OSDI 2025 Artifact Evaluation

Experience

Microsoft Research — Research Intern, Agentic Innovation Summer 2026

Redmond, WA
Joining the Agentic Innovation org (led by Chetan Bansal), mentored by Gagan Somashekar.
xlab — Graduate Research Assistant Fall 2024 – Present

Urbana, IL
Co-authored STRATUS, an LLM-based multi-agent system for autonomous SRE that formalizes a Transactional Non-Regression (TNR) safety specification and shows 1.5–5.4× improvement over state-of-the-art AI SRE agents on AIOpsLab and ITBench. Lead maintainer of AIOpsLab (700+ GitHub stars), co-author of ITBench with IBM. Build microservice testbeds, eBPF-based chaos engineering, Kubernetes workload orchestration, and LLM-driven fault diagnosis pipelines on Prometheus / Jaeger / OpenTelemetry stacks.
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center — Software Engineer Intern, HOSC Summer 2023

Huntsville, AL
Built a C++ forward error correction library (BCH, LDPC, convolutional codes) to CCSDS standards for the GPDM mission and contributed automation tools supporting flight controllers.
NASA Ames Research Center — Research Intern, Intelligent Systems Division Summer 2023

Mountain View, CA (remote)
Led reinforcement learning research for multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) in urban air traffic management using PyTorch / TensorFlow on a supercomputing cluster.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center — Software Engineer & Data Science Intern, HEASARC Fall 2022 – Spring 2023

Greenbelt, MD (remote)
Trained ML models to classify neutron star spectra from NICER payload data; redesigned SkyView, a React + Flask catalog for querying astrophysics datasets by sky position.
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center — Software Engineer Intern, POIC Summer 2022

Huntsville, AL
Designed an automation tool for ISS flight controllers to streamline timeline change processes.
Freelance — Software Engineer Sept 2020 – Sept 2023

Remote
Earned $60k+ on Upwork shipping cross-platform apps in Electron.js, React, and Express; managed full client lifecycle from proposal to delivery.
RoboThink — Software Engineer June 2018 – Sept 2020

Remote
Lead developer for RoboThink's educational tools built with Electron.js and React.

Teaching

Instructor, Discovery Partners Institute, University of Illinois. Designed and taught a two-week Data Science Intensive for Chicago Public School teachers so they can build their own data science lessons. Summer 2024, Summer 2025, Summer 2026.
Course Assistant, Data Science Discovery (CS 107), UIUC. Spring 2023 – Spring 2024.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science (current student), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2024-?
B.S. in Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2020-2024