I am in the process of moving to the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. I have openings for motivated PhD students to work with me on topics listed below, or more broadly on topics related to formal methods, trustworthy AI or program verification. See this page for more details. Openings for other types of positions (postdocs, interns, visiting students) will be advertised later.

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computing and Information Systems at Singapore Management University. I am broadly interested in Formal Methods and Programming Languages as well as Trustworthy AI and Safe Autonomy. Previously, I obtained my PhD in 2023 at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), where I was fortunate to be supervised by Krishnendu Chatterjee and Petr Novotný. For my PhD work, I received the Outstanding PhD Thesis and the Outstanding Scientific Achievement awards at ISTA. Before that, I obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

You can reach me at dzikelic@smu.edu.sg.

News

• April-July 2026. I will attend ICLR 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, PLDI 2026 in Denver, US, and FLOC 2026 in Lisbon, Portugal. If you will be around and would like to catch up or connect, please reach out.

• May 2026. Automated Approach for Solving Infinite-state Polynomial Reachability Games accepted at IJCAI 2026.

• April 2026. Parallel Abstract Interpretation for Polynomial Programs with Range Bound Assertions accepted at CAV 2026.

• April 2026. SuperDP: Differential Privacy Refutation via Supermartingales accepted at PLDI 2026.

• February 2026. Automating the Refinement of Reinforcement Learning Specifications accepted at ICLR 2026.

• December 2025. I gave an invited talk on “Neural Stochastic Control and Verification with Supermartingale Certificates” at the QuantFormal workshop at FSTTCS 2025 in Goa, India. Thank you for the invitation, I very much enjoyed the conference and many insightful discussions.

• October 2025. We will organise the second Singapore Programming Languages Summit on November 24, to be held at SMU. If you are a PL researcher based in Singapore (or will be visiting Singapore at the time), please consider participating and also presenting your work at the summit! More details here.

• October 2025. We will organise the inaugural Workshop on Post-AI Formal Methods (P-AI-FM) on January 26, co-located with AAAI 2026 in Singapore. We look forward to receiving your work and seeing you at the workshop! More details at the workshop website.

• October 2025. PolyQEnt: A Polynomial Quantified Entailment Solver has received a Distinguished Tool Paper award at ATVA 2025.

• October 2025. Synthesizing Efficient and Permissive Programmatic Runtime Shields for Neural Policies accepted at TOSEM.

• October 2025. I was awarded the Ministry of Education (MOE) Tier 1b grant for the project “Relational Verification of Probabilistic Models and Programs”. I have multiple openings for motivated PhD students and interns. Reach out if interested and see here for more details.