Ronghui Gu

Hiring!

My Columbia lab is looking for Ph.D. students. Check out our recent OSDI'23, OSDI'22, and CACM Research Highlights for an overview of our latest breakthrough on building verified systems software.

News

2025.03	HyperQ is accepted by OSDI 2025.
2025.03	Received an Amazon Research Award (4th times).
2024.01	Named the inaugural Tang Family Associate Professor.
2023.11	HyperEnclave is accepted by ASPLOS 2024.
2023.10	LVR is accepted by POPL 2024.
2023.01	Received a VMware Systems Research Award.
2023.01	Received an NSF CAREER Award.
2021.07	DistAI won the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI 2021.
2021.04	Grant on Verified Enclave Layers ($4,563,980) is funded by DARPA.

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Yale University, December 2016
• Distinguished Dissertation of Yale Graduate School of Art and Science.
• B.S. in Computer Science, Tsinghua University, June 2011.
• Graduation with Highest Distinction (3 out of 140).

Selected Publications

• [New][OSDI 2025] Quantum Virtual Machine.
  R. Tao, H. Zhu, J. Nieh, J. Yao, and R. Gu
  

• [POPL 2024] Mostly Automated Verification of Liveness Properties for Distributed Protocols with Ranking Functions.
  J. Yao, R. Tao, R. Gu, and J. Nieh
  

• [OSDI 2023] Spoq: Scaling Machine-Checkable Systems Verification in Coq.
  X. Li, X. Li, W. Qiang, R. Gu, and J. Nieh
  Media coverage: Columbia Engineering News

• [OSDI 2022] Design and Verification of the Arm Confidential Compute Architecture.
  X. Li, X. Li, C. Dall, R. Gu, J. Nieh, Y. Sait, and G. Stockwell
  Media coverage: Columbia Engineering News, USENIX ;login:

• [OSDI 2022] DuoAI: Fast, Automated Inference of Inductive Invariants for Verifying Distributed Protocols.
  J. Yao, R. Tao, R. Gu, and J. Nieh

• [PLDI 2022] Giallar: Push-button Verification for the Qiskit Quantum Compiler
  R. Tao, Y. Shi, J. Yao, X. Li, A. Javadi-Abhari, A. Cross, F. Chong, and R. Gu

• [SOSP 2021] Formal Verification of a Multiprocessor Hypervisor on Arm Relaxed Memory Hardware.
  R. Tao, J. Yao, X. Li, Shih-Wei Li, J. Nieh, and R. Gu

• [OSDI 2021] DistAI: Data-Driven Automated Invariant Learning for Distributed Protocols.
  J. Yao, R. Tao, R. Gu, J. Nieh, S. Jana, and G. Ryan.
  OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award

• [PLDI 2021] Gleipnir: Toward Practical Error Analysis for Quantum Programs.
  R. Tao, Y. Shi, J. Yao, J. Hui, F. Chong, and R. Gu

• [S&P (Oakland) 2021] A Secure and Formally Verified Linux KVM Hypervisor.
  S. Li, X. Li, R. Gu, J. Nieh, and J. Hui
  Media coverage: Columbia Engineering News

• [PLDI 2020] Learning Nonlinear Loop Invariants with Gated Continuous Logic Networks.
  J. Yao, G. Ryan, J. Wong, S. Jana, and R. Gu

• [CACM] Building Certified Concurrent OS Kernels.
  R. Gu, Z. Shao, H. Chen, J. Kim, J. Koenig, X. Wu, V. Sjoberg, and D. Constanzo.
  Research Highlights
  See "Technical Perspective: The Scalability of CertiKOS" by Andrew W. Appel.

• [SOSP 2019] Scaling Symbolic Evaluation for Automated Verification of Systems Code with Serval.
  L. Nelson, J. Bornholt, R. Gu, A. Baumann, E. Torlak, and X. Wang
  SOSP Best Paper Award

• [PLDI 2018] Certified Concurrent Abstraction Layers.
  R. Gu, Z. Shao, J. Kim, X. Wu, J. Koenig, V. Sjoberg, H. Chen, D. Constanzo, and T.Ramananandro

• [OSDI 2016] CertiKOS: An Extensible Architecture for Building Certified Concurrent OS Kernels.
  R. Gu, Z. Shao, H. Chen, X. Wu, J. Kim, V. Sjoberg, and D. Constanzo
  Media coverage: Yale News, International Business Times, Yale Daily News

• [POPL 2015] Deep Specifications and Certified Abstraction Layers.
  R. Gu, J. Koenig, T. Ramananandro, Z. Shao, X. Wu, S. Weng, H. Zhang, and Y. Guo

Program Committees

SOSP 2025	PLDI 2025	SOSP 2024	PLDI 2024	ASPLOS 2024
ATC 2024	EuroSys 2024	APLAS 2023	PLDI 2022	POPL 2022
OSDI 2021	PLDI 2020	NSDI 2019	SoCC 2019	CoqPL 2019

Selected Awards

Amazon Research Awards (co-PI), 2025.03.

Named the inaugural Tang Family Associate Professor, 2024.01.

VMware Systems Research Award, 2023.01.

NSF CAREER Award, 2023.01.

Builders and Innovators, Goldman Sachs, 2022.05.

Amazon Research Awards, 2022.04.

Amazon Research Awards (co-PI), 2021.07.

OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award, 2021.07.

The Top 100 Yale Alumni In Technology Of 2021, 2021.06.

Amazon Research Awards, 2021.04.

Columbia University’s Final Nominee for the Packard Fellowship, 2020.03.

SOSP Best Paper Award, 2019.10.

Communications of the ACM (CACM) Research Highlights, 2019.10.

Distinguished Dissertation Award, Yale University, 2016.12.

Software

Arm CCA

SeKVM

CertiKOS

mCertiKOS

DuoAI

DistAI

G-CLN

Students

• PhD: Xuheng Li, Raphael Sofaer, Kele Huang, Fanqi Yu, Yi Rong, Ganxiang Yang, and Wei Qiang.
• Former PhD: Runzhou Tao, Jianan Yao, and Xupeng Li.
• Student collaborators: Shih-Wei Li, John Hui, Yunong Shi (UChicago), Gabriel Ryan, Mengqi Liu (Yale), Mo Zou (SJTU), and Xinhao Yuan.
• BS: Justin Wong, River Dillon Keefer, Jerry Lin, and Amanda Liu.