Contact:
60 Fifth Avenue
Room 460
New York, NY 10011
(map)

About Me

I am a Faculty Fellow at the Courant Institute, New York University, working with Professor Thomas Wies. I am interested in logic, automata theory, and theoretical formal methods.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in August 2025, and my B.S. (Hons) from Yale-NUS College in May 2019. Between Yale-NUS and NYU, I spent a year verifying blockchain consensus protocols at Runtime Verification.

Publications

  1. Decision Problems for Global Protocol Specifications
    Elaine Li
    Ph.D. Thesis, 2025
    PDF Slides
  2. Certified Implementability of Global Multiparty Protocols
    Elaine Li and Thomas Wies
    ITP 2025
    PDF Slides
  3. Sprout: A Verifier for Symbolic Multiparty Protocols
    Elaine Li, Felix Stutz, Thomas Wies and Damien Zufferey
    CAV 2025
    PDF Artifact Slides
  4. Characterizing Implementability of Global Protocols with Infinite States and Data
    Elaine Li, Felix Stutz, Thomas Wies and Damien Zufferey
    OOPSLA 2025
    PDF
  5. Deciding Subtyping for Asynchronous Multiparty Sessions
    Elaine Li, Felix Stutz, and Thomas Wies
    ESOP 2024
    PDF Slides
  6. Complete Multiparty Session Type Projection with Automata
    Elaine Li, Felix Stutz, Thomas Wies and Damien Zufferey
    CAV 2023
    PDF Slides
  7. Formalizing Correct-by-Construction Casper in Coq
    Elaine Li, Traian Serbanuta, Denisa Diaconescu, Vlad Zamfir, and Grigore Rosu
    ICBC 2020
    PDF Slides
  8. Pumping, With or Without Choice
    Aquinas Hobor, Elaine Li and Frank Stephan
    APLAS 2019
    PDF Slides Coq artifact
  9. Formalizing Block Pumpable Language Theory
    Elaine Li
    Yale-NUS College Capstone Thesis, 2019
    PDF Slides

Awards and Honors

NYU Courant Sandra Bleistein Prize
2024
NYU GSAS Dean's Dissertation Fellowship
2023
CAV VMW Scholarship
2023
NYU GSAS MacCracken Fellowship
2020-2025
Helmut Veith Scholarship (declined)
2019

Invited Talks

Implementability and Synthesis of Global Protocols
  • Princeton University PL Seminar (April 2025)
  • Columbia University Systems seminar (February 2025)
  • Boston University POPV seminar (October 2024)
Synthesizing Distributed Protocols from Global Session Types
  • Simons Institute: Synthesis of Models and Systems (July 2024)
Multiparty Session Type Projection and Subtyping with Automata
  • UPenn PLClub (April 2024)
  • University of Luxembourg (April 2024)
  • Cornell PLDG (March 2024)
  • UCSC LSD seminar (October 2023)

Professional Activities

Program Committee
CAV 2026
PLACES 2025
Dafny 2024
Subreviewer
ICLP 2025
FMCAD 2024

Miscellaneous

Currently reading: Independent People by Halldór Laxness, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Remy pictures: