Cyrus Omar designs intelligent user interfaces for modern programming languages.

Cyrus Omar (he/him)
Associate Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Michigan
On sabbatical, 2026–27 🆕
Visiting Fellow
Energy and Environment Group
University of Cambridge
4624 BBB
comar@umich.edu
Bluesky Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com Bluesky
@neurocy.bsky.social
CV

Education

Carnegie Mellon University
PhD, Computer Science
UIUC
BS, Computer Science
BS, Molecular & Cellular Biology

Advising

PhD Students

Research Staff

Masters and Undergraduates

There are 10+ masters and undergraduate researchers in FP Lab — see the FP Lab webpage!

Former Advisees

FP Lab alum also include 200+ undergraduate and MS students, 15 of whom went on to PhD programs!

Service

2026
PLDI PC · PROPL Chair · VL/HCC PC · HATRA PC · LMPL PC · PLMW @ SPLASH Speaker · SPLASH SRC Judge · CSE Course Review Committee
2025
POPL PC · VL/HCC PC · GPCE PC · ML Family Workshop PC · HATRA PC · LIVE PC · CSE Curriculum Innovation Committee
2024
OOPSLA PC · VL/HCC PC · Onward! PC · LIVE PC · SPLASH-E PC · HATRA Publicity Chair · CSE DEI Committee
2023
PLDI PC · ECOOP PC · VL/HCC PC · MWPLS Co-chair · TyDe SC Chair · ECOOP Area Chair (Brave New Ideas and Pearls) · HATRA PC · IFL PC · SPLASH-E PC · SPLASH SRC · PLMW @ ICFP Panelist · CSE DEI Committee · CSE Hosting Committee

For older service roles, refer to my CV.

Awards and Honors

I lead the Future of Programming Lab (FP Lab), part of the vibrant MPLSE research community.
I am on sabbatical at the University of Cambridge for 2026–27, as a Visiting Fellow in the Energy and Environment Group in the Department of Computer Science and Technology and an Associate Scholar at Pembroke College.

Information Theoretic Foundations for Brain-Computer Interfaces

We built a provably optimal EEG-based brain-computer interface by studying the information theoretic properties of noisy asymmetric channels and developing statistical models of user intent for various types of communication/control tasks.

References

IJHCI 2010
A Feedback Information-Theoretic Approach to the Design of Brain-Computer Interfaces
Cyrus Omar, Abdullah Akce, Miles Johnson, Timothy Bretl, Rui Ma, Edward Maclin, Martin McCormick, Todd P. Coleman
ACC 2008
Policies for neural prosthetic control: Initial experiments with a text interface
Cyrus Omar, Miles Johnson, Timothy Bretl, Todd Coleman
ICASSP 2008
Querying the user properly for high-performance brain-machine interfaces: Recursive estimation, control, and feedback information-theoretic perspectives
Cyrus Omar, Miles Johnson, Timothy W. Bretl, Todd P. Coleman
# 1st Jan 2007••bci, neuroscience
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