►Guannan Wei
Guannan Wei
Research
Publications
Talks/  Posters
Teaching
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Quotes
May 18, 2023

Guannan Wei

Email: guannanwei at purdue.edu
Address: 305 N. University Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907
CV | Blog
Github | Twitter | Google Scholar

I’m a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Purdue University, advised by Tiark Rompf since 2017. I’m also a member of Purdue’s Programming Languages (PurPL) group. Previously I received M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah, where I studied static analysis in Matt Might’s research group. I majored in Laws and Business Management as an undergraduate at the China University of Geosciences, Beijing.

I was an intern at SambaNova Systems (Summer 2020, remote), Galois (Summer 2018, Portland, OR), Baidu (Fall 2013, Beijing), and two tech-startups (2012-2013, 2014-2015, Beijing).

I occasionally take notes of what I read, collect elegant programs, or post random thoughts in my Blog. I’m an amateur photographer, see my gallery and Instagram account.

Research

I am interested in the scientific and engineering aspects of computer programs. More specifically, I study programming languages and notions to help people build correct, safe, and fast programs. I also build tools that automatically generate, transform, and analyze programs to achieve correctness, safety, or performance.

Recently I focus on these directions:

  • High-performance program analysis engines using metaprogramming and compiler optimizations.
    We developed compilers for dynamic symbolic execution (ICSE ’23, PEPM ’22, FSE ’21, OOPSLA ’20) and abstract interpretation (OOPSLA ’19) by writing analyzers as staged definitional interpreters. Our recent development demonstrates efficient parallel symbolic execution by compiling to continuation-passing style and cooperative concurrency. I also developed a derivational approach to building big-step abstract interpreters from their small-step correspondences (ICFP ’18).

  • Expressive type-and-effect systems tracking aliases, separation, and dependencies for higher-order imperative languages.
    We developed the foundational reachability types with a flow-sensitive effect system (OOPSLA ’21), which has been extended with type-and-reachability polymorphism and applied to designing a graph-based compiler middle-end.

Publications

  1. Compiling Parallel Symbolic Execution with Continuations
    Guannan Wei, Songlin Jia, Ruiqi Gao, Haotian Deng, Shangyin Tan, Oliver Bračevac, Tiark Rompf
    The 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023)
    [pdf] [artifact]

  2. What If We Don’t Pop the Stack? The Return of Second-Class Values
    Anxhelo Xhebraj, Oliver Bračevac, Guannan Wei, Tiark Rompf
    Proceedings of the 36th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2022). Berlin, Germany
    [pdf] [dagstuhl] [artifact]

  3. Towards Partially Evaluating Symbolic Interpreters for All
    Shangyin Tan, Guannan Wei, Tiark Rompf
    ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM), co-located with POPL 2022. Philadelphia, PA, USA
    [pdf] [bib]

  4. Reachability Types: Tracking Aliasing and Separation in Higher-Order Functional Programs
    Yuyan Bao, Guannan Wei, Oliver Bračevac, Yuxuan Jiang, Qiyang He, Tiark Rompf
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 5 (OOPSLA 2021). Online/Chicago, IL, USA
    [pdf] [acm dl] [artifact]

  5. LLSC: A Parallel Symbolic Execution Compiler for LLVM IR (Tool Demonstration)
    Guannan Wei, Shangyin Tan, Oliver Bračevac, Tiark Rompf
    Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2021)
    [pdf] [acm dl] [demo]

  6. Compiling Symbolic Execution with Staging and Algebraic Effects
    Guannan Wei, Oliver Bračevac, Shangyin Tan, Tiark Rompf
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 4 (OOPSLA 2020). Online
    [pdf] [acm dl] [artifact]

  7. Staged Abstract Interpreters: Fast and Modular Whole-Program Analysis via Meta-Programming
    Guannan Wei, Yuxuan Chen, Tiark Rompf
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 3 (OOPSLA 2019). Athens, Greece
    [pdf] [acm dl] [artifact]

  8. Precise Reasoning with Structured Time, Structured Heaps, and Collective Operations
    Grégory Essertel, Guannan Wei, Tiark Rompf
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 3 (OOPSLA 2019). Athens, Greece
    [pdf] [acm dl] [artifact]

  9. BDA: Practical Dependence Analysis for Binary Executables by Unbiased Whole-program Path Sampling and Per-path Abstract Interpretation
    Zhuo Zhang, Wei You, Guanhong Tao, Guannan Wei, Yonghwi Kwon, Xiangyu Zhang
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 3 (OOPSLA 2019). Athens, Greece
    [pdf] [acm dl] [artifact]

  10. Towards Verified Binary Raising
    Joe Hendrix, Guannan Wei, Simon Winwood
    Workshop on Instruction Set Architecture Specification, co-located with ITP 2019. Portland, OR, USA
    [pdf] [bib]

  11. Graph Neural Reasoning for 2-Quantified Boolean Formula Solvers
    Zhanfu Yang, Fei Wang, Ziliang Chen, Guannan Wei, Tiark Rompf
    Workshop on Learning and Reasoning with Graph-Structured Representations, co-located with ICML 2019. Long Beach, CA, USA
    [pdf] [bib]

  12. Refunctionalization of Abstract Abstract Machines (Functional Pearl)
    Guannan Wei, James M. Decker, Tiark Rompf
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 2 (ICFP 2018). St. Louis, MO, USA
    [pdf] [acm dl] [artifact]

Talks/Posters

Teaching

Services

Open Source Contribution

Quotes

“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — Albert Camus

On the separation of practical and theoretical work — Christopher Strachey

Keep fun in computing — Alan Perlis