Stephen Bach Has Been Promoted To Associate Professor With Tenure
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on May 20, 2026
Brown CS is happy to announce that with the anticipated approval of Brown’s Corporation and effective as of July 1, 2026, Stephen Bach has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.
Named the Elliot Horowitz Assistant Professor in Computer Science last year, Steve joined the Brown CS faculty in 2018 after working as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. His doctorate, advised by Lise Getoor, is from the University of Maryland, and he holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from Georgetown University.
Steve leads the BATS (Bach’s Awesome Team of Students) machine learning research group, which aims to improve the processes by which humans teach and instruct computers. That includes learning to generalize from fewer examples with methods like zero-shot and few-shot learning as well as engineering training data with methods like synthetic data generation and programmatic weak supervision. Their objective is a reduction in the effort required by people, especially non-computer scientists in specialized, technical domains, to get computers to do what they want. Applications of their work include information extraction, image understanding, scientific discovery, and other areas of data science.
His recent research includes Self-Jailbreaking: Language Models Can Reason Themselves Out of Safety Alignment After Benign Reasoning Training, Revisiting Generalization Across Difficulty Levels: It's Not So Easy, Planetarium: A Rigorous Benchmark for Translating Text to Structured Planning Languages, and An Adaptive Method for Weak Supervision with Drifting Data. Steve teaches CSCI 1420 Machine Learning and CSCI 2952-C Learning with Limited Labeled Data.
Recent support for Steve’s work includes grants from the National Science Foundation for building AI agents to assist comprehensive assessments of the climate science literature, detecting radio frequency interference in radio astronomy data with AI, and developing better AI-powered models for cosmology. Steve’s latest accomplishments include co-authoring work that earned a Best Paper Award at the Workshop on Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) at the thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and jointly receiving a Seed Award from Brown University's Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR).
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
