Aaron Bembenek

computer scientist ❊ reader of books ❊ fisher of fish

About me

Aaron Bembenek

I am a computer science postdoc at the University of Melbourne supervised by Toby Murray. I work in the areas of programming languages and automated formal methods, with a current focus on automatically proving security properties about binary code.

I earned a PhD in computer science at Harvard University, where I was advised by Stephen Chong and was a member of the programming languages group. My PhD research focused on combining logic programming and constraint solving, with applications to program analysis and synthesis.

I have an undergraduate degree in classics from Princeton University. I enjoy reading and spending time outdoors.

Publications

Making Formulog Fast: An Argument for Unconventional Datalog Evaluation
Aaron Bembenek, Michael Greenberg, and Stephen Chong
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (OOPSLA 2024)
Received an OOPSLA Distinguished Artifact award
pdf ❊ bib ❊ artifact ❊ extended version
Combining Datalog and SAT-Based Solving in Code-Reasoning Tools
Aaron Bembenek
PhD dissertation (Harvard University, 2023)
site ❊ bib
From SMT to ASP: Solver-Based Approaches to Solving Datalog Synthesis-as-Rule-Selection Problems
Aaron Bembenek, Michael Greenberg, and Stephen Chong
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (POPL 2023)
pdf ❊ bib ❊ artifact
Formulog: Datalog + SMT + FP
Aaron Bembenek, Michael Greenberg, and Stephen Chong
4th International Workshop on the Resurgence of Datalog in Academia and Industry (Datalog 2.0 2022)
pdf ❊ bib
Formulog: Datalog for SMT-Based Static Analysis
Aaron Bembenek, Michael Greenberg, and Stephen Chong
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (OOPSLA 2020)
pdf ❊ bib ❊ artifact ❊ extended version ❊ talk
Datalog-Based Systems Can Use Incremental SMT Solving (Extended Abstract)
Aaron Bembenek, Michael Ballantyne, Michael Greenberg, and Nada Amin
36th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2020)
pdf ❊ bib ❊ talk
Going Into Greater Depth in the Quest for Hidden Frames (Late-Breaking Paper)
João Gonçalves, Aaron Bembenek, Pedro Martins, and Amílcar Cardoso
10th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2019)
pdf ❊ bib
Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non-Technical Audience
Alexandra Wood, Micah Altman, Aaron Bembenek, Mark Bun, Marco Gaboardi, James Honaker, Kobbi Nissim, David R. O'Brien, Thomas Steinke, and Salil Vadhan
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law (JETLaw 2018)
pdf ❊ bib
Bridging the Gap between Computer Science and Legal Approaches to Privacy
Kobbi Nissim, Aaron Bembenek, Alexandra Wood, Mark Bun, Marco Gaboardi, Urs Gasser, David R. O’Brien, and Salil Vadhan
Harvard Journal of Law & Technology (JOLT 2018)
Co-won the 2019 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies
pdf ❊ bib

Projects

Formulog
Formulog ties together the logic programming language Datalog and off-the-shelf SMT solvers. It is designed for writing SMT-based static analyses in a way that is both close to their formal specifications, and amenable to high-level optimizations and efficient evaluation.
AbcDatalog
AbcDatalog is an open-source implementation of the logic programming language Datalog written in Java. It provides a basic GUI and ready-to-use implementations of multiple standard Datalog evaluation algorithms. It is designed to be easily extensible with new evaluation engines and language features.

Teaching

Service

Honors and awards

Contact

Messenger pigeon is preferred. If your local dovecote is depleted, feel free to email me at . If you are on the University of Melbourne campus, you might be able to find me in Melbourne Connect (Building 290).