Hi! Welcome to my homepage!

My name is Trung. I am a research fellow at the Singapore Blockchain Innovation Programme (SBIP). Currently, I’m working with Professor Beng Chin Ooi at School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS) to analyze and verify the safety and security of blockchain smart contracts.

Previously, I obtained my BSc from Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), Vietnam in 2009 and PhD from NUS, Singapore in 2018. My PhD advisors are Professor Siau-Cheng Khoo and Professor Wei-Ngan Chin. I also worked previously in industry on computer security at BKAV, software development at A.N.Lab, Viettel, and FPT, and static software analysis at Oracle Labs Australia.

My email address is: ID@comp.nus.edu.sg, where ID = taqt.

Research

I’m interested in doing research in all areas related programming languages and software engineering, especially program analysis, software verification and testing. Currently, I am focusing on developing the static source code analyzer Discover to find bugs and vulnerabilities in computer programs and smart contracts. During my PhD, I implemented the theorem prover Songbird for proof obligations generated from automated software verification using separation logic. It is now used as a back-end of the tool Hip/Sleek to verify C/C++/Java programs.

More details about my research can be found in this page.

Teaching

I always enjoy teaching and mentoring junior students. I was inspired by Professor Olivier Danvy’s belief that watching students grow is a joy and the physicist Richard Feynman that teaching is a great way to learn. Below are the teaching and mentoring tasks that I have taken recently.

Research Mentor:

• Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai, final year undergraduate, HUST, 2009 - 2010 (final year project: SAT solving system).

• Pham Anh Tuan, exchanged undergraduate of HUST at NUS, 2012 (final year proejct: type inference system).

• Zhu Yongxin, final year undergraduate, NUS, 2014 - 2015 (final year project: Eclipse IDE-based GUI for software analyzer).

• Nguyen Thanh Toan, PhD student, NUS, 2017 - present (PhD thesis topic: automated program repair).

• Zhong Yuyi, PhD student, NUS, 2019 - present (PhD thesis topic: formal verification of machine learning algorithms).

• Ren Kunpeng, Master student, Peking University, 2019 - 2020 (Master thesis topic: smart contract verification), and PhD student, NUS, 2021 - present (PhD thesis topic: blockchain interoperability).

Teaching Assistant:

• CS5218, Principles of Program Analysis, School of Computing, NUS, 2015.

• YSC1212, Introduction to Computer Science, Yale-NUS College, NUS, 2016.

• CS6203, Advanced Topics in Database Systems, School of Computing, NUS, 2019.

• CS6203, Advanced Topics in Database Systems, School of Computing, NUS, 2021.

Services

• Reviewer of the conferences: CPP 2012, SAS 2013, ICFEM 2013, FM 2014, APLAS 2014, ICALP 2015, OOPSLA 2016, SV-COMP 2018, APLAS 2018, FLOPS 2018, CAV 2018, SEFM 2018, ATVA 2018, TACAS 2019, CAV 2019, ATVA 2019, ICDE 2020, SIGMOD 2020, KDD 2020, VLDB 2020, VLDB 2021, ATVA 2021, SIGMOD 2022, DASFAA 2022, ENASE 2022.

• Artifact Evaluation Committee Member of the conferences: POPL 2022, PLDI 2022.

• Mentor of the hackathon: Singapore Blockchain Innovation Challenge 2021.

• Administrator of the online forum ITBK for undergraduate students at School of Information and Communication Technology, HUST, 2007 - 2010.

Hacking

• I love using and hacking the Emacs editor. It works for me as a mini operating system: I do pretty much everything using Emacs, like writing code, taking notes, reading PDFs, managing files, surfing the web, etc. If you are interested in knowing Emacs, this website provides a comprehensive list of what it can do.

• Tired of Alt-Tab? I wrote a tutorial on how to set up shortcut keys to quickly open your mostly used applications.

• Merry Christmas and Happy New Year à la JavaScript.