Welcome to my website
Imagine a picture of me

My name is Bolton Bailey.

I am a sixth-year Ph.D. student at UIUC. I was previously advised by the venerable Matus Telgarsky (from whom I stole this website layout). Now I'm part of Andrew Miller's group.

I prove things and write code. My main interest is in formal verification for cryptography. My other interests include: Quantum Cryptography, wrapping things in Recursive SNARKs, and Cryptoeconomics.

Selected Work

Formalizing Soundness Proofs of SNARKs (Myself and Andrew Miller) (code) (video)

General Partially Fair Multi-Party Computation with VDFs (Myself, Andrew Miller, and Or Sattath) (ePrint)

Merkle Trees Optimized for Stateless Clients in Bitcoin (Myself and Surya Sankagiri) WTSC '21. (ePrint) (video)

A Gradual, Semi-Discrete Approach to Generative Network Training via Explicit Wasserstein Minimization (Yucheng Chen, Matus Telgarsky, Chao Zhang, Myself, Daniel Hsu, Jian Peng) ICML 2019. (arxiv)

Size-Noise Tradeoffs in Generative Networks (Myself and Matus Telgarsky) NeurIPS 2018 Spotlight. (arxiv) (slides) (video)

See also: My Google Scholar profile.

Timeline

During the Summer and Fall of 2022, I was a Software Engineer at RISC Zero, where I worked on a formalization of their zkVM for RISC-V.

I have a longstanding project on formalizing SNARKS using the Lean mathlib.

During Summer and Fall of 2020 my collaborator Surya and I worked on a network-efficient accumulator for Bitcoin. Our work was accepted at WTSC '21.

During Fall of 2019, I took Prof. David Forsyth's course on autonomous vehicles. Part of my project for the class was a lidar-based particle filter for tracking the location of a Gem e2 autonomous car. I made a GIF of it which you can see below. Imagine a picture of me

During Summer of 2019, I was a visit the Simons Institute. I presented in the Robustness reading group on poisoning. I also worked on some problems, but I was not able to solve them.

In 2019, I received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Teaching Assistantships

Last updated September 2021