Research Areas

• Programming Languages & Software Engineering
• Systems & Networking
• Algorithms & Theory

Research Interests

• Design and Implementation of Programming Languages
• Applied Logic for Software Verification
• Concurrent and Distributed Systems

Profile

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

Current Projects

• Logical Separation of Move Smart Contract State (funded by Facebook Research Gift)
• CertiChain: A Framework for Mechanically Verifying Blockchain Consensus Protocols (funded by NSoE-TSS)
• Scalable Deductive Synthesis of Thread-Safe Concurrency (funded by MOE Tier 1 grant)
• Distributed System Optimizations as Network Semantics Transformations (funded by Google Faculty Research Award)

Selected Publications

• Cyclic Program Synthesis
  Shachar Itzhaky, Hila Peleg, Nadia Polikarpova, Reuben Rowe, and Ilya Sergey
  42nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2021)

• Practical Smart Contract Sharding with Ownership and Commutativity Analysis
  George Pîrlea, Amrit Kumar, and Ilya Sergey
  42nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2021)

• Certifying Certainty and Uncertainty in Approximate Membership Query Structures
  Kiran Gopinathan, and Ilya Sergey
  32nd International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV 2020). 

• Safer Smart Contract Programming with Scilla
  Ilya Sergey, Vaivaswatha Nagaraj, Jacob Johannsen, Amrit Kumar, Anton Trunov, Ken Chan
  34th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA 2019) 

• Structuring the Synthesis of Heap-Manipulating Programs 
  Nadia Polikarpova and Ilya Sergey
  46th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL’19)

• Programming and Proving with Distributed Protocols
  Ilya Sergey, James R. Wilcox, and Zachary Tatlock
  45th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'18)

• RacerD: Compositional Static Race Detection
  Sam Blackshear, Nikos Gorogiannis, Peter O’Hearn, and Ilya Sergey
  33rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA’18)

Awards & Honours

• PLDI 2021 Distinguished Paper Award for the work "Cyclic Program Synthesis"
• Yale-NUS Distinguished Researcher Award for 2021
• AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for 2019
• OOPSLA 2019 Distinguished Artifact Award, “Safer Smart Contract Programming with Scilla”
• POPL 2019 Distinguished Paper Award for the work "Structuring the Synthesis of Heap-Manipulating Programs"
• Google Faculty Research Award recipient (2017). Google Inc

Teaching (2020/2021)

• PI3208: Dummy Module for GAP Claim
• CS6213: Special Topics in Distributed Computing
• YSC4230: Programming Language Design and Implementation (Yale-NUS College)
• YSC4231 Parallel, Concurrent and Distributed Programming (Yale-NUS College)
• YSC2229: Introductory Data Structures and Algorithms (Yale-NUS College)