George Pîrlea

Bio / Blog / Teaching / CV

I am a first-year PhD student at the National University of Singapore, supervised by Ilya Sergey.

My interests include formal methods, programming languages, distributed systems, and cryptography.

Get in touch via email: george@pirlea.net

Follow me on Twitter: @GeorgePirlea

Google Scholar: George Pîrlea

What's new

Apr 12	Hot off the presses: the preprint for PLDI'21 paper on smart contract sharding is now available.
Feb 26	Our paper on Practical Smart Contract Sharding with Ownership and Commutativity Analysis is (conditionally) accepted at PLDI'21. Preprint coming soon!
Oct 22	I served on the POPL'21 Artifact Evaluation Committee.
Aug 9	I joined Ilya Sergey's group at the NUS School of Computing. Very exciting!

Publications

1. Yasunari Watanabe, Kiran Gopinathan, George Pîrlea, Nadia Polikarpova, and Ilya Sergey. Certifying the Synthesis of Heap-Manipulating Programs. In Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 5 (ICFP 2021). August 2021. ACM.
2. George Pîrlea, Amrit Kumar, and Ilya Sergey. Practical Smart Contract Sharding with Ownership and Commutativity Analysis. In 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2021). Virtual, Canada. June 2021. ACM.
3. George Pîrlea and Ilya Sergey. Mechanising Blockchain Consensus. In 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP 2018). Los Angeles, CA, USA, January 2018. ACM.

Teaching

1. CS3243 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AY 2020/21 Sem 2)
2. YSC3208 Programming Language Design and Implementation (AY 2020/21 Sem 1)

Theses

1. Toychain: Formally Verified Blockchain Consensus
   MEng Thesis. Advised by Earl Barr and Ilya Sergey.
   

   Abstract: We present Toychain, the first proven-correct implementation of a Nakamoto-style blockchain consensus protocol. We improve our original model by removing several overly-strong assumptions, notably the assumption that hashing is injective. Then, we instantiate the model with a SHA256-based proof-of-work scheme and extract our proven-correct OCaml implementation of Nakamoto consensus. Finally, we execute our implementation on a local area network to test its effectiveness.

Selected talks

• A Formal Model of Rust's Pinning
  Given at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (September 2019).
• Formally Verified Blockchain Consensus
  Given at National University of Singapore (March 2019), Zilliqa Research (March 2019), and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (June 2019).
• Formally Verifying Coco
  Given at Microsoft Research Cambridge (August 2018).
• Mechanising Blockchain Consensus
  Given at CPP (January 2018) and Microsoft Research Cambridge (June 2018).