Kihong Heo (허기홍)

Associate Professor
Programming Systems Laboratory
School of Computing / Graduate School of Information Security
KAIST

Notice

I am looking for highly motivated graduate/undergraduate students who are interested in program analysis, program synthesis/transformation, and machine learning techniques for next-generation programming systems. For more detailed information, see projects, publications, talks, recruitment, blog, Youtube Video (in Korean), or send me an email.

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

News

Jun 2025	📄	Our paper Safeguarding Mobile GUI Agent via Logic-based Action Verification will appear at MobiCom 2025.
Jun 2025	🏆	UnitCon won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE 2025. Checkout our paper and research story.
Jun 2025	📄	Our paper Optimization-Directed Compiler Fuzzing for Continuous Translation Validation was published at PLDI 2025. Checkout our project page and research story.

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, 2025S
CS424: Program Reasoning, 2022F, 2023F, 2024F, 2025F
CS524: Program Analysis, 2021F, 2022F, 2024S, 2025S
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

Master Students

Professional Activities

Program Committee

2025: SOAP (PC Co-Chair), ICSE, APLAS, SAS (AE Co-Chair)
2024: ICSE, OOPSLA, SAS, LCTES
2023: PLDI
2022: PLDI, POPL, OOPSLA, SAS, FSE (SRC), ECOOP (Doctoral Symposium)
2021: APLAS, SYNT, OCAML
2020: TAPAS, ICSE (Virtualization Committee)
2019: PLDI (ERC)

Editorial Board

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) Associate Editor

Awards

Grand Prize at the 2025 AI Champion Competition, Ministry of Science and ICT, 2025
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, FSE 2025
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
KAIST
291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34141, Korea