Photo of Alexander Krentsel sitting and looking off to the left pensively.

Office: 421 Soda Hall
Email: akrentsel AT berkeley.edu

Alexander Krentsel

I am a senior researcher at Google Research in the Systems Research Group, and a PhD student at UC Berkeley in the NetSys lab, advised by Sylvia Ratnasamy. My research interests are in building reliable self-improving control systems. I have worked on formal verification, input validation, and decentralized architectures for global-scale networks. More recently, I've focused on agentic systems that improve their own code and behavior. My work at Google focuses on architecting network control systems and reasoning rigorously about their correctness and performance. My work at Berkeley has spanned control systems for self-driving cars and AI-driven scientific discovery.

I received a B.S. in EECS and a B.A. in Music from UC Berkeley in 2019, and am supported by an NSF CSGrad4US Fellowship.

My non-academic personal site is also here, and my blog is on Substack here.

Interests

I am drawn to problems that touch on control systems, decentralization, and usable and practical systems, which taken together have led me to networking. I enjoy systems thinking and the problems that come along with it. Outside of systems, I am very interested in computer science education and pedagogy.

News

Publications

Talks

Teaching

Music

Outside of research and teaching, I occasionally perform on violin with friends in classical and contemporary ensembles.