Ruotong Cheng
I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the PLSE group at the University of Toronto. My advisor is Prof. Azadeh Farzan. My primary research area is software verification. In addition, I am interested in automata theory, both for applications in verification and for its own sake.
Currently, problems that I work on are related to (1) proof systems and their automation for parameterized concurrent programs, and (2) verification of hypersafety properties through program alignment.
Publication
-
Products of Recursive Programs for Hypersafety Verification
with Azadeh Farzan
OOPSLA'25 (to appear) [extended version]
Teaching Assistantships
- CSC410 Software Testing and Verification, Fall 2025
- CSC110/111 Foundations of Computer Science, Summer 2025 (Prep TA)
- CSC448/2405 Formal Languages and Automata, Winter 2025
- CSC324 Principles of Programming Languages, Fall 2024 (Lead TA), Winter 2024
- CSC309 Programming on the Web, Fall 2023
Before graduate school
I received H.B.Sc. with high distinction from the University of Toronto in November 2023. During my undergrad, I worked on the following projects:
- Recursive program synthesis, with Dr. Victor Nicolet and Prof. Azadeh Farzan;
- Test concretization in model-based testing, with Dr. Lina Marsso and Dr. Nick Feng.
I also assisted with a research about the use of proof assistants, particularly Lean, in math education, led by Dr. Kitty Yan.
Prior to university, I participated in programming contests and won a silver medal in National Olympiad in Informatics, China, 2017. Many years later, as her paper faced the firing squad, Ruotong was to remember that distant afternoon when her schoolmate took her to discover finite-state machines...