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.

  1. 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 2025

  2. T. 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 Foundations

  3. S. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady
    Options and Futures Imperil Bitcoin’s Security
    IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Blockchain 2024b

  4. Z. 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 2023

  5. S. Farokhnia, A.K. Goharshady
    Reducing the Gas Usage of Ethereum Smart Contracts without a Sidechain
    IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, ICBC 2023

  6. S. 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

  1. 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