Ashwin Karthikeyan

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at the Privacy Preserving Systems Lab under the supervision of Prof. Anwar Hithnawi. My research centers on succint and privacy-preserving automated reasoning, with the goal of making formal verification scalable, reusable, and secure. Prior to enrolling in the Ph.D. program, I was a research-intern at MeelGroup where I developed practical zero-knowledge proofs to verify Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs). In the summer of 2025, I was a visiting scholar at Microsoft Research where I worked with Dr. Neeraj Kayal and Dr. Ramarathnam Venkatesan on robust optimization of smooth loss functions. Before this, I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Toronto.

Publications

Towards Practical Zero-Knowledge Proof for PSPACE Github

Ashwin Karthikeyan, Hengyu Liu, Kuldeep S. Meel, Ning Luo

IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland) 2026.