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I am a Masters student at the University of Illinois Chicago, graduating in December 2026. I work under the supervision of Prof. Luis Pina on memory models and multi-version execution of managed languages.

Also, I'm thankful to Prashast Srivastava as I got to explore in details on directed fuzzing.

Before that, I did my undergrad from the Islamic University of Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh. My undergraduate research was in finding vulnerabilities in webassembly binaries.

Timeline

Graduate Research Assistant, Summer'25 - Present
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Fall'24 - Spring'25

Recent works

pyrr-mvx: Record/replay and multi-version execution for free threaded Python. A leader process runs the real syscalls and streams results over a lock free shared memory ring to a follower running the same program with all I/O removed. 263 of 397 CPython test suite files pass under divergence detection, and a dying leader can hand its live sockets to the follower over SCM_RIGHTS fd transport.
py-svf-analysis: SVF style static value flow analysis for Python. Field sensitive Andersen points-to over a custom SSA IR, memory SSA with strong updates, and a sparse value flow graph you can slice for taint questions. Validated against PyCG and dynamic traces.
CE: A C-like language and compiler with an LLVM backend. Every source type erases to a single i64 word, with phantom typed heap primitives, Hindley Milner inference for polymorphic functions, and region based memory management instead of a garbage collector. (try it out)
Clox: Lox language interpreter. Stack based virtual machine with custom IR.
Jlox: Lox language interpreter based on JVM.

Papers

Performance Evaluation of Biased Reference Counting in Free-threaded Python (poster, GCSR 2026 Workshop, Northwestern University, 2026)

General Research Interest

Multithreading and Concurrency
Compilers
Static Program Analysis
Software Reliability
Debugging and Record-Replay

Frequently Used Languages and toolchains

C/C++
Python
LLVM
x86 Assembly

Courses I've Ta'ed for:

CS 361: Systems Programming, Spring'25
CS 261: Machine Organization, Fall'24

Contact

fsaif[at]uic[dot]edu

Farhan Saif