… a PhD candidate working with Prof. Panagiotis Manolios at Khoury College, Northeastern University. My research interests lie in Formal Methods, Theorem Proving and Disproving, Decision Procedures, Programming Languages and Distributed systems.

In my free time, I like to dabble in astrophotography as well as play chess and tabletennis.

News

• <2025-05-14 Wed> Our paper "A Formalization of the Correctness of the Floodsub Protocol" won the best student paper award at ACL2 Workshop 2025.
• <2024-02-19 Mon> Successfully proposed my thesis : "Refinement based reasoning of P2P pubsub protocols is feasible and useful"
• <2023-11-14 Tue> Our paper "Verification of Gossipsub in ACL2s" won the best student paper award at ACL2 Workshop 2023.
• <2023-06-07 Wed> Started an internship at Rivos Inc in Portlad, Oregon.
• <2023-01-28 Sat> Selected to chair the session on "Forming and Evaluating Student Groups Papers" at SIGCSE 2023
• <2022-11-09 Wed> Presented our work on verification of GossipSub protocol in an invited talk on LibP2P day @ IPFS Camp 2022, Lisbon, Portugal, and at Khoury Systems Day, 2023
• <2022-09-02 Fri> Successfully completed an internship @ Amazon Minneapolis, during Summer 2022
• <2022-07-30 Sat> Attending and Volunteering at FLoC 2022
• <2021-07-09 Fri> Our paper: Mathematical Programming Modulo Strings got accepted at FMCAD 2021
• <2019-10-21 Mon> Selected to attend PLMW @ POPL 2019 in New Orleans

Publications

• A Formalization of the Correctness of the Floodsub Protocol 🏆 Best student paper award

  Ankit Kumar and Panagiotis Manolios

  ACL2 Workshop 2025 [pdf] [code]

• Formal Model-Driven Analysis of Resilience of GossipSub to Sybil Attacks

  Ankit Kumar, Max von Hippel, Cristina Nita-Rotaru and Panagiotis Manolios

  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2024 [pdf] [code]

• Verification of GossipSub in ACL2s 🏆 Best student paper award

  Ankit Kumar, Max von Hippel, Cristina Nita-Rotaru and Panagiotis Manolios

  ACL2 Workshop 2023 [pdf] [code]

• Proving Calculational Proofs Correct 🏆 Second best student paper award

  Ankit Kumar, Drew Walter and Panagiotis Manolios

  ACL2 Workshop 2023 [pdf] [code]

• Calculational Proofs in ACL2s

  Drew Walter, Ankit Kumar and Panagiotis Manolios

  arXiv Preprint 2023 [pdf] [code]

• Automated grading of automata with ACL2s

  Ankit Kumar, Drew Walter and Panagiotis Manolios

  ThEdu 2022 [pdf] [code]

• Mathematical Programming Modulo Strings

  Ankit Kumar and Panagiotis Manolios

  FMCAD 2021 [pdf] [code]

Talks

Caraxes: Tracking Critical Data in the Cloud

<2022-09-02 Fri> End of internship talk at Amazon, where Drew Walter and I showed how to "lift" taint analysis from code level to cloud level, and also demoed a prototype tool we developed called Caraxes. The slides and video of this talk are available in the Amazon internal network.

Mathematical Programming Modulo Strings (Invited Talk at Boston Computational Club)

<2021-10-15 Fri> Talked about my first FMCAD paper on Mathematical Programming Modulo Strings.

Automated Grading of Automata with ACL2s

<2022-07-11 Mon> Talk on automatic grading and feedback generation for Theory of Computation assignments using the ACL2s theorem prover, during ThEdu '21.

History of Rank Polymorphic Type Systems in Array Programming Languages

Lecture notes for a seminar on type systems for array programming languages covering APL, implicit scaling, Haskell and Remora.

Dependently Typed Proof Assistants

Lecture notes for a seminar on the implementation of dependently typed proof assistants, comparing and contrasting NuPRL and Coq proof assistants.

Honors and Awards

• Won Best Student Paper Award at ACL2 Workshop 2023 for our paper : Verification of GossipSub in ACL2s
• Student Travel Fellowship to attend PLMW at POPL 2019

Teaching

I have been a TA for the following courses: Algorithms (A), Logic and Computation (LC), Theory of Computation (TC) and Computer Aided Reasoning (CAR).