Zachary D. Sisco

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the School of Data Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. I completed my PhD at UC Santa Barbara, co-advised by Jonathan Balkind and Ben Hardekopf.

I conduct research at the intersection of Programming Languages and Computer Architecture. My research integrates formal methods into open-source languages for chip design to increase developer agility with correctness guarantees.

I am looking for students! You can read my research overview for more information. Please send me an email if you think we have mutual interests.

Conference and Journal Publications

• Control Logic Synthesis: Drawing the Rest of the OWL (ASPLOS 2024)
  Zachary D. Sisco, Andrew David Alex, Zechen Ma, Yeganeh Aghamohammadi, Boming Kong, Benjamin Darnell, Timothy Sherwood, Ben Hardekopf, Jonathan Balkind
  (Source code repo)
• Loop Rerolling for Hardware Decompilation (PLDI 2023)
  Zachary D. Sisco, Jonathan Balkind, Timothy Sherwood, Ben Hardekopf
  (Source code repo)
• A semantics-based approach to concept assignment in assembly code (ICCWS 2017)
  Zachary D. Sisco, Adam Bryant
• Modeling information flow for an autonomous agent to support reverse engineering work (JDMS 2017)
  Zachary D. Sisco, Patrick Dudenhofer, Adam Bryant

Workshop Papers

• There and Back Again: A Netlist’s Tale With Much Egraphin’ (LATTE 2024)
  Gus Henry Smith, Zachary D. Sisco, Thanawat Techaumnuaiwit, Jingtao Xia, Vishal Canumalla, Andrew Cheung, Zachary Tatlock, Chandrakana Nandi, Jonathan Balkind
  (Web demo)
• Semi-Automated Translation of a Formal ISA Specification to Hardware (PLARCH 2023)
  Harlan Kringen, Zachary Sisco, Jonathan Balkind, Timothy Sherwood, Ben Hardekopf
• On the Generality of Matrix Multiplication (PLARCH 2023)
  Andrew Alex, Zachary D. Sisco, Jonathan Balkind
• A Position on Program Synthesis for Processor Development (LATTE 2022)
  Zachary D. Sisco, Jonathan Balkind, Timothy Sherwood, Ben Hardekopf
  (Source code repo)

Theses

• Automated Reasoning for Agile and Robust Chip Design
  PhD Dissertation (UC Santa Barbara) 2025
• Verifying data-oriented gadgets in binary programs to build data-only exploits
  MS Thesis (Wright State University) 2018

Bits

• Formalizing a Consensus Protocol using Dependent Session Types
• Scheme2Beam: A Source Compiler from Scheme to Erlang
• Investigations into a Separating-typed Language
• Synthesizing Concurrent Code using a Solver-aided DSL

Photography

• Photo albums:
  I’ve recently gotten into film photography. I shoot on an old Olympus Trip 35 — mine was manufactured in Japan around October, 1973.