Aaron Bembenek
computer scientist ❊ reader of books ❊ fisher of fish
About me

I am a computer science PhD candidate at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where I am a member of the programming languages group. I am advised by Stephen Chong. My current research is on static analysis and logic programming. I am also interested in learning more broadly about knowledge and automated reasoning.
My undergraduate degree is in classics from Princeton University. I enjoy reading and spending time outdoors.
Publications
- Formulog: Datalog for SMT-Based Static Analysis
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Aaron Bembenek, Michael Greenberg, and Stephen Chong
OOPSLA 2020
pdf ❊ bib ❊ artifact ❊ extended version - Datalog-Based Systems Can Use Incremental SMT Solving
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Aaron Bembenek, Michael Ballantyne, Michael Greenberg, and Nada Amin
Extended abstract
ICLP 2020
pdf ❊ bib ❊ talk - Going Into Greater Depth in the Quest for Hidden Frames
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João Gonçalves, Aaron Bembenek, Pedro Martins, and Amílcar Cardoso
Late-breaking paper
ICCC 2019
pdf ❊ bib - Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non-Technical Audience
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Alexandra Wood, Micah Altman, Aaron Bembenek, Mark Bun, Marco Gaboardi,
James Honaker, Kobbi Nissim, David R. O'Brien, Thomas Steinke, and Salil
Vadhan
JETLaw 2018
pdf ❊ bib - Bridging the Gap between Computer Science and Legal Approaches to Privacy
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Kobbi Nissim, Aaron Bembenek, Alexandra Wood, Mark Bun,
Marco Gaboardi, Urs Gasser, David R. O’Brien, and Salil Vadhan
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
- Co-organizer, CS 252r: Verified Compilation (Harvard, 2020)
- Teaching Fellow, CS 153: Compilers (Harvard, 2018)
- Teaching Fellow, CS 152: Programming Languages (Harvard, 2016)
Honors and awards
- Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS, 2019)
- Nominated for Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates (Harvard, 2018)
- Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (Harvard, 2016 and 2018)
- Smith Family Graduate Science and Engineering Fellowship (Harvard, 2017-2018)
Contact
Messenger pigeon is preferred. If your local dovecote is depleted, feel
free to email me at
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If you are on campus, you can probably find me in Maxwell Dworkin 309.