Ankit Kumar

PhD Student

Ankit Kumar
  • MTech in Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur
  • BTech in Electrical Engineering, IIT (BHU) Varanasi

Ankit Kumar is a PhD student at Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences focusing on formal methods and programming languages, advised by Professor Dr. Pete Manolios. He is from Dhanbad, Jharkand in India. He earned his MTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur and his BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi. His research focuses on formal reasoning about programming language design, including writing machine-checkable proofs to prove properties. Kumar hopes to work in academia in the future.

About Me

  • Hometown: Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India
  • Field of Study: Formal methods and Programming Languages
  • PhD Advisor: Pete Manolios

What are the specifics of your graduate education (thus far)?

  • Computer Aided Reasoning
  • Type theoretic Foundations of Programming Languages
  • Programs, Proofs and Types
  • Principles of Programming Languages
  • Finite Automata on Infinite Inputs

What are your research interests in a bit more detail? Is your current academic/research path what you always had in mind for yourself, or has it evolved somewhat? If so, how/why?

Currently my work involves formally reasoning about programming language design, which includes writing machine checkable proofs to prove properties. This is very close to the kind of work I had planned.

What’s one problem you’d like to solve with your research/work?

I would like to enable proof assistants to not only check proofs, but also to help programmers come up with constructs that allow their proof to go through.

What aspect of what you do is most interesting/fascinating to you? What aspects of your research (findings, angles, problems you’re solving) might surprise others?

Proving theorems using a proof assistant is very interesting/addictive. Using it to solve research problems is fascinating.

What are your research/career goals, going forward?

Academia seems pretty interesting!