Guannan Wei
Email: guannanwei at purdue.edu
Address: 305 N. University Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907
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I’m on the 2024 job market, feel free to reach out if you believe I would be a good fit for your department.
• Curriculum Vitae
• Research Statement
• Teaching Statement
• Diversity Statement
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University working with Tiark Rompf. In August 2023, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. 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
Building high-performance program analyzers with metaprogramming and high-level programming abstractions.
We have developped compilation (ICSE ’23, PEPM ’22, FSE ’21, OOPSLA ’20, OOPSLA ’19), derivation (ICFP ’18), and transformation techniques (OOPSLA ’19) to build correct-by-construction, performant, and flexible program analyzers, enabling to use higher-level abstractions yet without compromising performance or correctness.
Our recent development of the parallel symbolic-execution compiler GenSym (ICSE ’23) demonstrates efficient (4x vs KLEE, single-thread) execution by compiling to continuation-passing style via the 1st Futamura projection.
Designing imperative higher-order languages that statically track aliases, separation, and dependencies.
We have designed reachability types with a flow-sensitive effect system (OOPSLA ’21), offering programmers Rust-style reasoning principles in more expressive and flexible higher-order languages. Reachability types have been used to guide optimizatoins in graph-based compiler IRs (OOPSLA ’23) and extended with \texttt{F}_{<:}-style type-and-reachability polymorphism (POPL ’24). We have also designed a type system to track storage modes, enabling flexible and efficient memory allocation on the stack (ECOOP ’22)
We are implementing a prototype programming language Diamond with \texttt{F}_{<:}-style precise and polymorphic reachability types.
Publications
Consolidating Smart Contracts with Behavioral Contracts
Guannan Wei, Danning Xie, Wuqi Zhang, Yongwei Yuan, Zhuo Zhang
Under submission
Conference/Workshop Papers
Polymorphic Reachability Types: Tracking Freshness, Aliasing, and Separation in Higher-Order Generic Programs
Guannan Wei, Oliver Bračevac, Songlin Jia, Yuyan Bao, Tiark Rompf
Conditionally accepted at POPL 2024
[arxiv]Graph IRs for Impure Higher-Order Languages – Making Aggressive Optimizations Affordable with Precise Effect Dependencies
Oliver Bračevac, Guannan Wei, Songlin Jia, Supun Abeysinghe, Yuxuan Jiang, Yuyan Bao, Tiark Rompf
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 7 (OOPSLA 2023). Cascais, Portugal
[pdf] [acm dl]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] [ieee] [artifact]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]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]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]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]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]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]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]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]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]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]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]
Dissertation
Metaprogramming Program Analyzers
Guannan Wei
PhD Dissertation. Purdue University. 2023
[pdf]
Talks/Posters
Polymorphic Reachability Types: Tracking Freshness, Aliasing, and Separation in Higher-Order Generic Programs
Midwest PL Summit. Ann Arbor, MI. October, 2023 [poster]Compiling and Controlling Symbolic Execution
Northeastern University Programming Languages Seminar. Boston, MA. Dec 2023 [slides]
Midwest PL Summit. Ann Arbor, MI. Oct 2023 [slides]
Purdue PL Seminar. West Lafayette, IN. December, 2022 [slides]Compiling Parallel Symbolic Execution with Continuations
ICSE 2023. Remote. May, 2023 [slides]Reachability Types: Tracking Aliasing and Separation in Higher-Order Functional Programs
OOPSLA 2021. Chicago, IL. October, 2021 [poster]LLSC: A Parallel Symbolic Execution Compiler for LLVM IR
ESEC/FSE 2021. Online. August, 2021 [slides]Compiling Symbolic Execution with Staging and Algebraic Effects
OOPSLA 2020. Online. November, 2020 [slides]Metaprogramming for Program Analyzers
PurPL Retreat. Online. August, 2020 [slides]Staged Abstract Interpreters
OOPSLA 2019. Athens, Greece. October 23, 2019 [slides]Refunctionalization of Abstract Abstract Machines (Functional Pearl)
ICFP 2018. St. Louis, MO. September 24, 2018 [slides][poster]Precise Reasoning with Structured Heaps and Collective Operations à la Map/Reduce
Purdue PL Seminar. West Lafayette, IN. January 26, 2018 [slides]
Midwest PL Summit (MWPLS 2017). Bloomington, IN. December 1, 2017 [slides]
Huawei Research Summit. Urbana-Champaign, IL. March 8, 2018 [slides]
Teaching
- Lead Teaching Assistant, CS352 Compilers: Principles and Practice (undergraduate), Purdue University, Spring 2020 [testimonials]
Teaching Assistant, CS502 Compilers: Principles and Practice (graduate), Purdue University, Fall 2019
Lab Instructor, CS252 System Programming (undergraduate), Purdue University, Fall 2017, Spring 2018
Services
PC Member: ICCQ 2024, ICCQ 2023, VMIL 2021, EuroSys Shadow 2021
Artifact Evaluation Committee Member: POPL 2024, ICFP 2023, PLDI 2023, POPL 2023, PLDI 2022, PLDI 2021, ICFP 2021, ISSTA 2021, OOPSLA 2020, ICFP 2020, CAV 2020, ICFP 2019
Student Volunteer: POPL 2023, ICFP 2019, MWPLS & PurPL Fest 2019
Sub-reviewer: ICLR 2019
Voluntary translator, Software Foundations (Chinese edition)
Contributed to Lightweight Modular Staging, Scala documentation, Highlight.js, etc.
Quotes
“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — Albert Camus