About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science department at Cornell University advised by Prof. Justin Hsu. Previously, I worked on software-defined networking as a software engineer at Microsoft for a year and prior to that, I was an undergraduate student at BITS Pilani, India. During my undergrad, I had the pleasure to spend a semester at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany working with Dr. Bjoern Brandenburg on a theory-oriented real-time operating system (TOROS) toward my undergraduate thesis.

Research Focus

(Recipient of LinkedIn Ph.D. Fellowship, 2026-2027)
My dissertation research focus is to design provably correct runtime monitoring mechanisms for enforcing safety and security properties in systems without access to the source code. I focus on systems with hierarchical execution structures, like trees, and have designed an automata-theoretic monitoring framework based on finite state automaton [2] and visibly pushdown automaton [3] (for control flow properties). A central theme of this monitoring mechanism is that it is distributed, non-invasive, and treats the system as a blackbox. To demonstrate the practical impact of my research, I’ve implemented the runtime monitors — SafeTree [3] and SafeNom [4] — for microservice applications. The class of safety properties enforceable by this framework naturally transfer to various domains, like finance, healthcare, and safety-critical cyber-physical systems.

Selected First-Author Publications

Full publication record can be found on dblp or Google scholar.

Talks

Service

Currently, I am serving as a PLTea organizer and the Czar for the Cornell PL Discussion Group. I have also served on the artifact evaluation committee for POPL'{24, 25}.

News

Teaching

Contact

You can reach me at: [(λx.x @ cs.cornell.edu) kgrewal]; LinkedIn; or GitHub.