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Ilya Sergey

Associate Professor (tenure track) at Yale-NUS College and NUS School of Computing
Lead Language Designer at Zilliqa
Postal Address:

 Yale-NUS College, 28 College Avenue West
#01-501, Singapore 138533
Office Location:
 #RC3-01-03E, Cendana College
Office Phone: +65 6516 1903
Office Hours: Wed 4:00-6:00pm (during academic term)
Email:
Availability: Outlook Calendar (it takes a while to load)

I do research in programming language theory, including, but not limited to types, semantics, software verification, and program synthesis. Lately, I have been mostly focusing on developing sound and scalable methodologies for building provably correct concurrent and distributed systems (with applications to blockchains and smart contracts). I also designed and co-developed Scilla, a programming language for safe and secure smart contracts. For my work, I hack mechanised proofs in Coq, and write functional code in OCaml, Scala, and Haskell.

Since November 2018, I am a tenure-track Associate Professor at Yale-NUS College (Singapore), holding a joint appointment with NUS School of Computing. I am also a Co-PI at NUS Crystal Centre. From November 2015 till October 2018, I was a faculty at the Department of Computer Science of University College London. Prior to that, I was a postdoc at IMDEA Software Institute. I defended my PhD in November 2012 at CS Department of KU Leuven. I got my MSc degree in Mathematics and CS in 2008 from Saint Petersburg State University. Before joining academia I worked as a software developer at JetBrains.

Curriculum Vitae: [PDF]

What's New

Apr 17 I have been awarded the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, and will be giving an associated keynote at ECOOP'19 in July. Here's the related News Entry at NUS School of Computing page.
Mar 26 Will be serving on the programme committee for CPP 2020, a conference where you should submit your next masterpiece, formally verified in Coq (or any other proof assistant).
Jan 31 Our POPL'19 paper on program synthesis, made it to NUS School of Computing news and to Yale-NUS College news.
Jan 9 I will be giving a talk on How to Bootsrap a Research Project at PLMW @ POPL'19.
Nov 28 A work-in-progress report on probabilistic verification of security properties of blockchain protocols will be presented by Kiran Gopinathan at CoqPL 2019.
Nov 12 Gave a talk entitled What We Talk about When We Talk about Formally Verified Systems at Blockchain and Cybersecurity Workshop 2018 hosted by National University of Singapore.
Nov 5 A paper on practical programming with distributed protocos (with Kristoffer Just Andersen), will appear at PADL 2019.
Oct 9 Two papers accepted at POPL 2019: on program synthesis via Separation Logic (with Nadia Polikarpova), and on proving no-false-positives for unsound static race detectors (with Nikos Gorogiannis and Peter O'Hearn).
Sep 8 Looking forward to visit Dominique Devriese at KU Leuven on September 19 and give a talk on program synthesis with Separation Logic.
Aug 29 On September 3-5, I will be visiting Éric Tanter and the research group of Cătălin Hriţcu at Inria Paris.
Aug 23 Our paper on Finding the Greedy, Prodigal, and Suicidal Contracts at Scale, with Ivica Nikolić, Aashish Kolluri, Prateek Saxena and Aquinas Hobor, got accepted to ACSAC 2018.
Aug 15 I am looking forward to visit Sukyoung Ryu and Hongseok Yang and their groups at KAIST in Daejeon on August 23-28.
Aug 14 On August 21, I will be giving a series of lectures on implementation and verification of distributed systems and their applications at SIGPL Summer School 2018 in Seoul (yes, that page is entirely in Korean, but, even if you are, just like me, not a Korean speaker, you can still try to identify the titles of my talks there).
Aug 6 Scilla, a strongly typed intermediate language for smart contracts developed by Zilliqa, is now open-sourced: here's the repository, and here's a new shiny web page with tutorials and documentation. Contributions are welcome!

All news

Students and Research Associates

I am very fortunate to work with these brilliant people:
Current and past affiliates

Recent Publications and Manuscripts

[All publications | DBLP | Google Scholar | CSAuthors]
Lecture notes

In Press

Selected Projects and Software

I am a also a creator of the La Clojure plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. It is no longer maintained, but its sources are available on GitHub.

Check my GitHub profile for my other projects.

Teaching

Collaborators

Over the years, I have been very lucky to work on joint research projects with some great people:

Miscellanea

I am married to CG artist Lilia Anisimova.

I am on Twitter as @ilyasergey.

Last time I checked, my Erdős number was 4.

The photo above is couresy of Elena Alhimovich. Here is my "official" photo, suitable for appropriate occasions. Yet another 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.

Last modified: Thu Apr 18 19:57:51 +08 2019