Nuno Lopes
Funding
Our research has been generously supported by the following sponsors:
I thank the continuous support of all of our sponsors. Our work wouldn't be
possible without their support.
If you and/or company have benefitted from our work, for example, by using our
free tools, papers or presentations, or by hiring our former students,
please consider sponsoring our research lab.
Publications
Last 5:
Complete Publications List (DBLP, Scholar)
Slides
Current Projects
Prospective Students
I'm looking for great students that want to do Masters or PhD with me.
Please get in touch if you are interested.
Note that for Masters you must be enrolled with IST before contacting me.
Possible topics (non-exhaustive list):
- Compilers: IR design, scalable link-time optimizations, PGO, UB-aware optimizations
- Automatic software verification, namely of compilers (LLVM, MLIR, V8)
- Compilers and runtimes for machine learning frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow
- Code gen of machine learning kernels for many-core chips
- Law and regulations: formal specifications, model checking, optimization
- Security: automatic exploit generation, miscompilation exploitation
- Physical security: probablistic model checking
- Application of the Chinese Remainder theorem to SMT solving
- Blockchain mining: market efficiency (CPU/RAM/storage/network)
- Blockchain security: exploiting AMMs, compilers
- Trading/MM: volatily, cross-asset hedging, online ads
Current Students
PhD
MSc
Former Students
PhD
MSc
- Diogo Venâncio, IST/UL, 2024. A study on non-linear functions for quantization of machine learning models.
- João Silveira, IST/UL, 2024. Source-to-source optimization of safe Rust programs translated from C++.
- Lucian Popescu, Politehnica University of Bucharest, 2024. Performance impact of undefined behavior optimizations in C/C++.
- Manuel Brito, IST/UL, 2024. Optimistic global value numbering for compilers with undefined behavior.
- André Nascimento, IST/UTL, 2024. Cairo smart contract verification.
- George Mitenkov, ETH Zurich, 2023. Metering the meter, or how to efficiently and deterministically charge the execution of smart contracts.
- Henrique Preto, IST/UL, 2023. Automatic translation of C++ to Rust.
- Susana Monteiro, IST/UL, 2023. Static analysis for C++ Rust-like lifetime annotations.
- Sofia Salgueiro, IST/UL, 2021. Automatic synthesis of optimal datacenter networks.
- Kevin de Vos, IST/UL, 2020. Translation validation for the LLVM compiler.
- Filipe Azevedo, IST/UL, 2020. Evaluating value-wise poison values for the LLVM compiler.
- Janek van Oirschot, Eindhoven University of Technology, 2019. Extending tree pattern matching for application to peephole optimizations.
Academic Service
- National body representative (of Portugal) in the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22 committee (programming languages), and in its WG21 (C++)
- Organization chair: FLoC'26
- Program committee: APLAS'23, PLDI'23, CGO'23, PLDI SRC'22, EuroLLVM'22, PLDI'21, VSTTE'20, VSTTE'19, PLDI'19, VSTTE'18, EuroLLVM'18, EuroLLVM'17, CGO'17, LLVM'15
- External review committee: POPL'17
- Reviewer: OOPSLA'25, PLDI'23, OOPSLA'20, SAS'18, FMCAD'14, DAC'14, CAV'14, ESOP'11, PASTE'10
- External reviewer: ERC grants 2018
Past Projects
- Alive: Automatic verification of LLVM peephole optimizations
- CORK: Compiler Optimization Correctness Checking
- HSF: An automatic software verifier based on Horn Clauses
- PSyCO: Precondition Synthesis for Compiler Optimizations
- Torchy: A tracing JIT compiler for PyTorch
