About me
I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I am fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Jiasi Shen. Previously, I obtained my MPhil at the same university. I was awarded a reseach grant from Ethereum Foundation (2nd biggest cryptocurrency).
Research Interests
I’m intersted in the following research areas: Program Verification, Parameterized Algorithms, and Blockchain. Please refer to my research page for more details.
Grants and Awards
I’ve been fortunate to receive the following grants, honours, and awards:
- Ethereum Foundation Grant (ESP), 233,000 HKD, 2024
- Hong Kong Research Grants Council Research Travel Grant, 11,500 HKD, 2024
- Hong Kong Research Grants Council Research Travel Grant, 13,500 HKD, 2024
- HKUST Ph.D. Fellowship, 649,080 HKD, 2023
- Hong Kong Research Grants Council Research Travel Grant, 12,778 HKD, 2023
- Hong Kong Research Grants Council Research Travel Grant, 7,030 HKD, 2023
- HKUST M.Phil. Fellowship, 432,720 HKD, 2021
- Best Undergraduate Thesis Award, Department of Computer Engineering, Yazd University, 2018
- Exchange Student Fellowship, Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, 2014
Publications
For an updated list of publications, please refer to my Google Scholar page.
T. Barakbayeva, S. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady, P. Li, Z. Lin
Improved Gas Optimization of Smart Contracts
International Conference on Fundamentals of Software Engineering, FSEN 2025T. Barakbayeva, S. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady, M. Gufler, S. Novozhilov
Pixiu: Optimal Block Production Revenues on Cardano
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Blockchain 2024a
In collaboration with Cardano FoundationsS. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady
Options and Futures Imperil Bitcoin’s Security
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Blockchain 2024bZ. Cai, S. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady, S. Hitarth
Asparagus: Automated Synthesis of Parametric Gas Upper-bounds for Smart Contracts
ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2023S. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady
Reducing the Gas Usage of Ethereum Smart Contracts without a Sidechain
IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, ICBC 2023S. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady
Alleviating High Gas Costs by Secure and Trustless Off-chain Execution of Smart Contracts
ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2023
Under Submissions
- S. Akshay, S. Chakraborty, S. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady, H.J. Motwani, D. Zikelic
An LP-Based Approach for Weighted Model Integration with Non-Linear Arithmetic
International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2025