Ilya Sergey
Associate Professor at National University of Singapore
I am a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Computing of National University of Singapore, where I lead the VERSE lab as a part of PLSE@NUS group. I am also a Research Consultant at Mysten Labs.
I do research in programming languages, software verification, distributed systems, and program synthesis. I am the recipient of the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize 2019. I serve as the General Chair for ICFP’25. I designed and co-developed Scilla programming language and organised the ICFP Programming Contest 2019. In the past, I contributed to Facebook Infer and Glasgow Haskell Compiler. Very long time ago, I used to work on Scala and Clojure language support in IntelliJ IDEA.
In 2018-2024, I held a joint appointment at Yale-NUS College. Before moving to Singapore, I was a faculty at University College London. Prior to that, I was a postdoc at IMDEA Software Institute. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from KU Leuven, and an MSc in mathematics from St Petersburg University. Before joining academia I worked as a software engineer at JetBrains.
coordinates
| Postal Address: | School of Computing, National University of Singapore COM1, 13 Computing Drive, Singapore 117417 |
| Email: | |
| Office: | COM3-02-56 |
| Office Phone: | +65 6601 1466 |
| Availability: | Outlook Calendar |
announcements
- I am actively looking for motivated PhD students who would like to work on software analysis, verification, and certified synthesis, applying those techniques to concurrent and distributed systems. Feel free to email me if you'd like to chat about research opportunities (please, check the lab page for the relevant topics first) and apply here. The application deadlines are 15 June and 15 December.
- Research internships: In case if you are interested in an internship, please send me an email with your CV and a paragraph of text describing your specific interests in the topics of my reseatch (see the VERSE lab page for more details). Strong background in PL/logic/verification or systems-building is a must. Prospective internship candidates will have to complete a pre-interview verification assignment.
news
| May 26, 2025 | Our work on accelerating SMT-based program verifiers (with Kiran Gopinathan, Dionysios Spiliopoulos, Vikram Goyal, Peter Müller, and Markus Püschel) will appear at CAV’25. |
| Apr 14, 2025 | We are excited to release Veil, a new framework for verifying distributed protocols, automatically and interactively, in Lean! The accompanying paper (with George Pîrlea, Vladimir Gladshtein, Elad Kinsbruner, and Qiyuan Zhao) will appear at CAV’25. |
| Feb 21, 2025 | Our paper on synthesising Separation Logic predicates using Answer Set Programming (with Ziyi Yang) is accepted at OOPSLA’25. |
| Jan 24, 2025 | Our work on programming language synthesis for automated exploit generation (with Yuxi Ling, Gokul Rajiv, and Kiran Gopinathan) will appear at the 34th USENIX Security Symposium. |
| Jan 10, 2025 | All materials for my Yale-NUS course on Parallel, Concurrent, and Distributed Programming are now publicly available. |
| Oct 29, 2024 | Together with Yong Kiam Tan, we are organising the first Singapore Programming Language Summit, which will take place on 4 December 2024. Please, register by November 8 if you’d like to attend and give a talk. |
| Oct 2, 2024 | I am excited to serve as the General Chair for ICFP’25 and as the Local Chair for the joint ICFP/SPLASH’25 conference, which will take place in Singapore on 12-18 October 2025. |
| Aug 27, 2024 | Our paper on implementing concurrent data structures via batch-parallelism (joint work with Callista Le, Kiran Gopinathan, Koon Wen Lee, and Seth Gilbert) will appear at OOPSLA’24. |
selected publications
miscellanea
Last time I checked, my Erdős number was 4.
Here is a high-resolution "official" photo of me, suitable for appropriate occasions. Just in case, here's a more casual picture, couresy of Elena Alhimovich. Yet another old picture of mine by Jorge Cham, for I have contributed to the PHD Movie 2 on Kickstarter.
While living in Madrid, I enjoyed its inimitable atmosphere and delicious food. For the latter, this Maribel's Dining Guide to Madrid (kindly provided by Aleks Nanevski) always came in handy.