Nik photo 

Nik Sultana, PhD

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Illinois Institute of Technology

Contact: nsultana1 at(symbol) iit dot edu  CV

I'm interested in building better (performance + flexibility + security) distributed systems, and I develop techniques for this using programming theory, formal logic, and systems engineering.


Bio: Before joining Illinois Tech I was a postdoc at the UPenn Distributed Systems Lab and at the Cambridge Systems Research Group where I worked on various research projects on computer systems. Up to my PhD I did theoretical research. For my PhD I developed a compiler-based approach to proof translation, and before that I worked on constructive proof search and the verification of refactorings using interactive theorem-proving. I did my undergrad at the University of Malta.


Research Opportunities

Find out more about funded PhD opportunities related to my research. If you're an Illinois Tech student, check out my page on student projects related to my research. You can find out more about my research by browsing this homepage.

Recent


Research interests

Distributed systems, Programmable networking, Security (software and network), Automated reasoning, Formal methods.

Acknowledgement for research funding/support: DARPA, Google, RES-MATCH, URA, XUP.

If you're interested in Computer Networking then do follow the Networked Systems Tech Talks.

And if you're at Illinois Tech and interested in Computer Science research, then do join the CS research mailing list.


Teaching


Students

At Illinois Tech I'm currently working with:
  • (CS497) Hyunsuk Bang
  • (RA) Sean Cummings
  • (RES-MATCH) H. E. Greenblatt
  • (CS497) Marelle León
  • (RA) Mohammad Firas Sada
  • (CS497) Alexander Wolosewicz

See my page on funded opportunities for a PhD in Computer Science related to my research.

If you're already at Illinois Tech, I'm happy to discuss undergrad (CS49{1,7}) and MS (CS59{1,7}) projects. Also see my current list of student projects.

Previously at Illinois Tech I worked with Neil Dhote, Xue Zhang, Rigden Atsatsang, Mohamad Dib Fares, Luis Casarrubios Elez, Cyprien Gueyraud, Simrat Kaur, Irina Klein and Shivam Patel.

Earlier, at the University of Pennsylvania I worked with the following Research Assistants: Achala Rao, Zihao Jin (visiting from Tsinghua University), Anirudh Chelluri, Nishanth Prabhu, Shilpi Bose, Henry Zhu, Ke Zhong (visiting from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, now a PhD student at Penn), Zhaoyang Han, Ruijie Mao, Digvijaysinh Chauhan, Nishanth Shyamkumar, Shivani Burad, Zhilei Zheng, Garvit Khandelwal, Ritvik Sadana, Rakesh Nagda, Heena Nagda (from Georgia Tech), Stephen Carrasquillo, Junyong Zhao, Saket, Andrew Zhao, and Aishwarya Wesanekar.

And before that at the University of Cambridge I supervised Jonny Shipton's 2016 UROP (research internship) and the "Part II" (undergrad dissertation) projects of Thomas Le Feuvre, Radu Voroneanu (co-supervised with Lucas Dixon), Daniel Spencer (co-supervised with Richard Mortier), and Rupert Horlick (co-supervised with Richard Mortier).

I'm gathering a list of general IIT- and Chicago-related Resources for Students.


Projects & System Releases


Pitchfork (2022, on GitLab)
Decomposition of C programs for privilege separation.


Flightplan (2020, on GitHub)
Decomposition & heterogeneous allocation of P4 programs to benefit SDN.

Emu (2017, on GitHub)
New standard library for creating high-performance network functions using HLS.


Flowdar (2019, on GitLab)
Understanding the flow of control, data, and resource-usage of software.

Pax (2016, on GitHub) and projects that build on top of it: TCPuny and Recap.
Abstractions for packet-processors written in high-level & managed languages.


DoSarray (2018, on GitHub)
Carrying out experiments involving Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks and mitigations.

Motto (2016, on GitHub)
Compiler and reference runtime for the Flick system for application-level services.


Smaller systems:
  • Apache httpd Worker Union MPM (2019, GitLab)
  • TYM Datalog (2019, GitHub)
  • Caper (2019, GitLab)

Most of my work is released as open source. For other projects see my GitHub and GitLab.


Publications

These are indexed at DBLP and Google Scholar.

Recent work:


Videos (Demos/Talks)

HotNets'22 presentation
PERA Paper (talk @ HotNets'22)
Flightplan video
PERA Slides (talk @ HotSoS'23)
FDP video
Pitchfork Slides (talk @ HotSoS'23)
LATTE'21 presentation
Position paper (talk @ LATTE'21)
Flightplan video
Flightplan (talk @ NSDI'21)
FDP video
FDP

Wharf (talk @ NetCompute'18)

Flightplan (talk @ ONF'18)

Emu (talk @ BCS AIPG seminar, 2017)