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.
Talks
Towards Practical Zero-Knowledge Proof for PSPACE
- International Workshop on Highlights in Organizing and Optimizing Proof-logging Systems (WHOOPS '26) at the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2026), Lisbon, July 2026
- IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P '2026), San Francisco, May 2026
- Ontario Cryptography Day, Toronto, November 2025
Scaling Zero Knowledge UNSAT Verification via Normalized Chaining
- Pragmatics of SAT International Workshop (PoS '26) at the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2026), Lisbon, July 2026
Publications
Ashwin Karthikeyan*, Ethan Kharitonov*, Kuldeep S. Meel, Anwar Hithnawi
Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning (LPAR 2026)
Ashwin Karthikeyan, Hengyu Liu, Kuldeep S. Meel, Ning Luo
IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland) 2026.