Welcome to Tony's personal website

My name is Tony Zhang. I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, advised by Manos Kapritsos. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Cornell University in 2018. My current research focuses on designing new formal verification techniques for systems software.

Outside of verification, I am broadly interested in all facets of distributed systems. For instance, I designed a leaderless multi-partition transaction protocol for Apache Cassandra, and contributed to a PODC paper proving that Lamport’s interpretation of the Paxos algorithm was strictly stronger than necessary. I am also working with Mysten Labs in buidling a distributed execution engine for the Sui blockchain.

I am also pleased to annouce that I have been awarded the 2024 MongoDB PhD Fellowship for my research!

Publications and Technical Reports

Nuda Zhang, Travis Hance, Manos Kapritsos, Tej Chajed, Bryan Parno. Inductive Invariants That Spark Joy: Using Invariant Taxonomies to Streamline Distributed Systems Proofs. To appear in OSDI 2024.
Quentin Kniep, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Alberto Sonnino, Igor Zablotchi, Nuda Zhang. Pilotfish: Distributed Transaction Execution for Lazy Blockchains. Tech Report (2024). [link]
Tony Nuda Zhang, Upamanyu Sharma, Manos Kapritsos. Performal: Formal Verification of Latency Properties for Distributed Systems. In Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2023) [pdf]
Benedict Elliott Smith, Tony Zhang, Blake Eggleston, Scott Andreas. CEP-15: Fast General Purpose Transactions. Cassandra Enhancement Proposal Whitepaper (2021) [link]
Eli Goldweber, Nuda Zhang, Manos Kapritsos. Brief Announcement: On the Significance of Consecutive Ballots in Paxos. 39th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2020) [link]

Random

Current leisure pursuits:

Snowboarding 🏂
Sim racing and watching F1 🏎
Muay thai 🇹🇭
Cooking 🥘

Profile last updated Mar 2024