PhD Student
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Northeastern University

Email: curto.b@northeastern.edu

Interests: computer systems & formal verification

Hobbies: eating new foods, exploring new cities, 한국어 학습, and exercising

I’m a PhD Student at Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, advised by Ji-Yong Shin. My research and interests lie at the intersection of computer systems and formal verification. I build systems that are mathematically proven to be correct and I develop methods to make building these systems easier. My ongoing work focuses specifically on weakly consistent distributed systems.

Before joining Northeastern, I earned a M.S. from the University of Waterloo advised by Martin Karsten, where I completed a thesis project entitled “Improving Data Locality in Applications through Execution Delegation“. Before that, I was employed as a full-time Back-End R&D Engineer at Geopipe, Inc. for two years. Before that, I earned a B.A. with honors in Computer Science and B.A. in Mathematics from NYU. Please see my CV for more details.

Industry Experience

Back-End Research & Development Engineer, Geopipe, Inc., New York, NY

  • Managed and developed the generation of virtual model products.
  • Implemented and tested research algorithms to improve the quality and accuracy of product 
models. Work funded by NSF SBIR: Phase II grant.
  • Supervised the daily work of undergraduate interns.

Back-End Research & Development Engineer, Geopipe, Inc., New York, NY

  • Managed and developed the generation of virtual model products
  • Assisted in the implementation and testing of research algorithms to improve the quality and 
accuracy of product models. Work funded by NSF SBIR: Phase I grant.

Selected Research Experience

NU PhD Research Assistant, Advisor: Ji-Yong Shin (2022-present)
Developing a top-down verification framework for weakly consistent distributed systems based on novel compositional and operational models. Verified, using this framework, safety and liveness properties of several Go implementations.

UW Master’s Research Assistant, Advisor: Martin Karsten (2020-2022)
Thesis: Improving Data Locality in Applications through Execution Delegation.
Developed tools and methods for predicting situations where delegating execution between cores via user thread migration can improve an application’s data locality and, therefore, performance.

NYU Senior Honors Thesis, Advisor: Christopher Mitchell (2017-2018)
Thesis: Ghosting ASLR: A Spectre Extension.
Designed, implemented, and evaluated a novel approach for defeating address space layout randomization by leveraging the Spectre microprocessor vulnerability.

NYU Courant Undergraduate Research Fellow, Advisor: Jinyang Li (Summer 2016)
Implemented and evaluated a novel database storage structure to reduce the latency of accesses performed in parallel with database entry migration.

Publications

Bryant J. Curto, Jeonghyeon Kim, Alan Wang, Gijung Im, Jieung Kim, Jeehoon Kang, and Ji-Yong Shin (2025). “Compositional Model-Driven Verification of Weakly Consistent Distributed Systems”. In: Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems. PLOS ’25. Seoul, Republic of Korea: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 42–50. isbn: 9798400722257. doi: 10.1145/3764860.3768331. url: https://doi.org/10.1145/3764860.3768331.

Kezhi Xiong, Soonwon Moon, Joshua H Kang, Bryant Curto, Jieung Kim, and Ji-Yong Shin (2025). “ReCraft: Self-Contained Split, Merge, and Membership Change of Raft Protocol”. In: 2025 55th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). IEEE, pp. 157–170.

Curto, Bryant J (2023). “Improving Data Locality in Applications through Execution Delegation”. MA thesis. University of Waterloo.

Patents

Bryant J. Curto, Thomas Daniel Dickerson, and Daniel Christopher Ritchie (Mar. 2023). Systems and methods for inferring object from aerial imagery. US Patent App. 17/909,119.