Ernest Ng

About me

Email: ernest@cs.cornell.edu
GitHub: ngernest

Hi! I’m a Computer Science PhD student at Cornell. I work on programming languages & systems research in the Capra lab, advised by Adrian Sampson & Kevin Laeufer.

I’m currently working on two projects:

(With collaborators from Cornell) A DSL for specifying communication protocols at the register-transfer level (RTL), with the aim of making it easier to test and debug such protocols
(With collaborators from AWS, Buffalo and Maryland) New abstractions for property-based testing (PBT) generators in Lean, and deploying PBT in industry

During the summers of 2025 & 2026, I interned with the AWS Automated Reasoning Group. I did my undergrad at Penn, where I worked on PBT research, advised by Harry Goldstein & Benjamin Pierce in the PLClub (Penn’s PL group). Before grad school, I worked in industry for a year as a data engineer.

Outside of CS, I enjoy playing the pipe organ. I study organ performance with Annette Richards and Amanda Mole, and work as an organist for Cornell’s Episcopal Church.

Here’s my resume and a list of projects I’ve done.

Research

Specifying Hardware Communication as Programs
Ernest Ng, Nikil Shyamsunder, Francis Pham, Adrian Sampson, Kevin Laeufer
Ongoing work, presented at YArch @ ISCA ’26 [Poster] [arXiv] [Code]
(An initial version of this work was presented by Nikil at the FMCAD ’25 Student Forum)
Mica: Automated Differential Testing for OCaml Modules
Ernest Ng, Harrison Goldstein, Benjamin Pierce
OCaml Workshop 2024 [Slides] [Talk Video] [Code]
Received 2nd place at the ICFP 2023 SRC (poster)

Talks

Specifying Hardware Communication as Programs (slides)
- MIT FLAME Lab Seminar (Invited), July 2026
- YArch (Young Architect Workshop) @ ISCA ’26, June 2026
- EPFL Programming Languages & Formal Methods Seminar (Invited), May 2026
- NJPLS (New Jersey Programming Languages & Systems Seminar), May 2026
Chamelean: Property-Based Testing for Lean via Metaprogramming (slides) (Work done at AWS)
- Cornell Programming Languages Discussion Group, September 2025
Mica: Automated Differential Testing for OCaml Modules (slides)
- Bloomberg OCaml Developers Seminar (Invited), September 2024
- OCaml Workshop @ ICFP ’24, September 2024
- ICFP ’23 Student Research Competition, September 2023

Other

Have we met before? I’d love to hear from you! I was at the following:

Conferences	Workshops	Summer schools
ASPLOS '26 @ Pittsburgh ICFP '24 @ Milan POPL '24 @ London ICFP '23 @ Seattle	YArch @ ISCA '26 @ Raleigh NJPLS (May '26) @ Penn MIT PL Review '26 @ Cambridge Upstate PL (Aug '25) @ Cornell NJPLS (Dec '24) @ Cornell Tech IFIP WG 2.11 (March '24) @ Philadelphia NJPLS (Nov '23) @ Princeton NJPLS (May '23) @ Penn	Brown Systems Week '26 @ Providence CMMRS '23 @ Saarbrücken OPLSS '23 @ Eugene

Teaching

I’ve served as a teaching assistant for the following courses:

Cornell:

CS 4160: Formal Verification (Rocq) (Spring 2026)
CS 3410: Computer Systems (Fall 2025)

Penn:

CIS 3800: Operating Systems (Fall 2023)
Software Foundations Rocq seminar (for Penn’s REPL summer research program) (Summer 2023)
CIS 1904/1940: Introduction to Haskell (Spring 2023)
CIS 2400: Computer Systems (Fall 2022)
CIS 5450: Big Data Analytics (Spring - Fall 2022, Head TA for the Fall)
CIS 5500: Databases (Summer 2022)