Kihong Heo (허기홍)

Associate Professor Programming Systems Laboratory School of Computing / Graduate School of Information Security Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Vita

Present	Associate Professor, KAIST
2020 - 2024	Assistant Professor, KAIST
2017 - 2019	Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Pennsylvania
2009 - 2017	Ph.D., Computer Science & Engineering, Seoul National University
2005 - 2009	B.S., Computer Science & Engineering, Seoul National University

Research Interest

My research aims to develop program reasoning systems for safe and reliable software. In particular, I am working on the following topics:

• AI-based program analysis systems for detecting deep semantic software bugs
• General-purpose program simplification systems for secure and efficient software
• Scalable program synthesis systems for automatic software generation and repair

For more information about my research, see projects, publications, talks, and the following Youtube videos (in Korean).

Courses

• CS348: Introduction to Information Security, 2021S, 2022S, 2023S
• CS424: Program Reasoning, 2022F, 2023F, 2024F
• CS524: Program Analysis, 2021F, 2022F, 2024S
• IS511: Introduction to Information Security, 2021S
• IS593: Language-based Security, 2020S, 2023F
• IS661: Advanced Software Security, 2020F, 2022S, 2024S
• CS966: KAIST SoC Colloquium, 2023S [photo]

Students

Ph.D Students

• Yeonhee Ryou
• Taeeun Kim
• Sujin Jang

Master Students

• Changgong Lee
• Jaeseong Kwon
• Dongjae Lee
• Geon Park
• Jaehoon Jang

See more.

Professional Activities

Program Committee Members

• 2025: ICSE
• 2024: ICSE, OOPSLA, SAS, LCTES
• 2023: PLDI
• 2022: PLDI, POPL, OOPSLA, SAS
• 2021: APLAS, SYNT, OCAML
• 2020: TAPAS

Others

• 2022: FSE (SRC), ECOOP (Doctoral Symposium)
• 2020: ICSE (Virtualization Committee)
• 2019: PLDI (ERC)

Software

I have contributed to the following open-source software:

• Tracer: Signature-based Static Analysis for Detecting Recurring Vulnerabilities
• Chisel: an automated program debloating system
• Sparrow: a static analyzer for C program
• Petablox: declarative program analysis framework for Big Code
• Infer: a static analyzer for Java, C, C++, and Objective-C
• Euphony: a probabilistic model-guided program synthesizer

Awards

• Amazon Research Award, 2024
• The Soo-Young Lee Teaching innovation Award, KAIST, 2024
• Prize for Excellence in Teaching, KAIST, 2024
• Best Artifact Award, ICSE 2022
• ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award, PLDI 2019
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ICSE 2019
• Outstanding Dissertation Award, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, 2017

Contact

kihong.heo (at) kaist.ac.kr
+82-42-350-3581
Room 2321, N5
School of Computing
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34141, Korea