Current Position: Postdoc Researcher with Prof. Milind Kulkarni at Purdue University (PurPL).
Education: PhD in Computer Science from Northeastern University (NEU PRL, 2023).
Contacts: a​@​pelenitsyn.top, Calendly.
Latest News (all news)
- Mar 2026: Accepted an offer from Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania to start as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Fall 2026
- Jan 2026: Managed a new release of the Cabal build system and tool (3.16.1.0).
- Jan 2025: Our paper on accelerating Barnes—Hut simulation with ray-tracing cores was accepted to PPoPP 2025. Congrats to Vani who did the heavy lifting!
Research
I am broadly interested in programming languages and compilers with an angle to performance assurance. The central motif of my research has been enabling efficient high-level programming whether through types, memory layouts, or utilizing modern hardware. My professional experience is laid out in my Curriculum Vitæ, and the list of academic publications is available on Google Scholar.
Research Bio
While on postdoc with Milind at Purdue (2023–now), I am looking into making irregular computations (tree traversals) more efficient via compilation or algorithm design for recent hardware. Our main topics are:
- functional programming with densely represented datatypes with the Gibbon compiler (e.g. Marmoset (ECOOP ’24) and Gibbon-GC (ISMM’24)),
- compilers for sparse tensors computations (e.g. SparseAuto (OOPSLA’24)),
- general-purpose computations on ray-tracing hardware (e.g. Arkade (ICS’24) — best paper award).
During my PhD at Northeastern (2018–2023) and RA at Czech Technical University (2017–2018), I was assessing the design and implementation of the Julia programming language (OOPSLA ’18, OOPSLA ’21, VMIL ’23). I’m still looking into Julia’s notion of type stability — the topic of my PhD dissertation.
During my teaching appointment at SFedU (2011–2016), I was working on generic programming techniques (PCS’15) and adviced students on topics in functional programming: datatype-generic programming (TFP’18 presentation and draft), monads for structuring effects (TMPA’17), linear types for expressing resource management and quantum computing.
During my graduate studies at SFedU (2007–2012, MSc in 2009), I worked on improving software designs for computer algebra and error-correcting codes in C++ using generic and metaprogramming (Prikl.Inf.’11, in Russian).
Programming
I’m passionate about functional programming and Haskell in particular. I have been using Haskell now and then since about 2011. Lately, my two main Haskell-related endeavors are:
- maintaining Cabal library and build tool for Haskell,
- maintaining a community version of the popular Haskell textbook Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
My past contributions to the Haskell ecosystem include patching GHC, the main Haskell compiler, and developing a prototype bridge between GHC and the Bazel build system during my internship at Tweag.
More technical interests
More generally, I’m interested in programming (or, more generally, “software”) languages as they pertain to software and systems, including
- programming languages’ ecosystems (especially, Haskell and Julia ones),
- build systems, such as Cabal and Bazel, and software package managers, especially the Nix package manager and NixOS,
- verified software via interactive theorem provers and dependent types, such as Coq, Agda, and Idris,
- reproducible research and related virtualization and containerization technologies (Docker, etc.),
- modal editing (in the spirit of
vi) and (Doom) Emacs, Linux and Open Source Software.