Assistant Professor, The University of Kansas
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department
2034 Eaton Hall
Institute for Information Sciences
137 Nichols Hall
[email protected] or [email protected]
@ngsankha /
@sankhs.com /
ngsankha
I am an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at The University of Kansas. I am interested in practical tools that help programmers build correct and efficient software. I direct the KU Programming Systems Group.
I got my PhD from the University of Maryland, advised by Prof. Jeff Foster and Prof. David Van Horn. I did my undergrad from from IIT Jodhpur in India.
Prior Work
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Meta: Worked on effect encapsulation for the Hack language, and shipped it production. It’s fun to design languages when you have access to the biggest users of the language!
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Ruby Type Systems: Part of the RDL team, where we built the research prototype of Ruby type systems. Many of our ideas have made it into Ruby 3 and the Sorbet type checker (used by Stripe, GitHub, and Shopify)!
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BrowserStack: As one of the early engineers, I helped build the Automate and App Live products among other things. Here is a blog post describing an realtime messaging service I built (think Pusher but works in $70/month) with a note from the co-founder after I started my PhD.
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Mozilla Firefox: I used to contribute to Firefox, mostly to SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript engine. You can see my commits and find my name on
about:credits.
News
- Serving on the PLDI 2026 Program Committee. September 28, 2025
- Received the Kansas NSF EPSCoR First Award to work on reliable software and error resiliency for software in disaster prone regions. July 03, 2025
- Received the New Faculty Research Development (NFRD) Award to work on combining formal methods based program synthesis with LLMs. December 03, 2024
- Serving as the OOPSLA 2024 Artifact Evaluation Committee co-chair. September 17, 2024
- Serving as the OOPSLA 2024 Artifact Evaluation Committee co-chair. September 13, 2023
[More …]
Publications
Absynthe: Abstract Interpretation-Guided Synthesis.
Sankha Narayan Guria, Jeffrey S. Foster and David Van Horn.
PLDI 2023.
ACM /
Preprint /
Source Code
Program Synthesis with Lightweight Abstractions.
Sankha Narayan Guria.
PhD Dissertation.
DRUM
ANOSY: Approximated Knowledge Synthesis with Refinement Types for Declassification.
Sankha Narayan Guria, Niki Vazou, Marco Guarnieri and James Parker.
PLDI 2022.
ACM /
Preprint /
Source Code /
Talk
RbSyn: Type- and Effect-Guided Program Synthesis.
Sankha Narayan Guria, Jeffrey S. Foster and David Van Horn.
PLDI 2021.
ACM /
Extended Version /
Source Code /
Talk
Type-Level Computations for Ruby Libraries.
Milod Kazerounian, Sankha Narayan Guria, Niki Vazou, Jeffrey S. Foster and David Van Horn.
PLDI 2019.
ACM /
Video /
Extended Version /
Source Code
Transparent Object Proxies for JavaScript.
Matthias Keil, Sankha Narayan Guria, Andreas Schlegel, Manuel Geffken and Peter Thiemann.
ECOOP 2015.
LIPICS /
Video /
Project Homepage /
Artifact /
Source Code
Teaching
EECS 700: Introduction to Program Synthesis
Fall 2024 / Fall 2023
EECS 662: Programming Languages
Spring 2025 / Spring 2024