I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the Chief Technology Officer of Tarides. I am interested in building robust, secure and scalable systems using programming language technology.

I led the development of Multicore OCaml, a concurrent and parallel extension of the OCaml programming language. Multicore OCaml is now merged into OCaml, and is available for general use in OCaml 5.0. Effect handlers introduced as part of the concurrency story of Multicore OCaml has had influence on the design of React Hooks and WebAssembly stack switching.

I’ve co-founded several companies

• Tarides - France
• OCaml Labs Consultancy - UK (joined Tarides)
• Segfault Systems - India (joined Tarides)

to build systems that are functional, and functional programming in OCaml turns out to be a fine choice for this.

Earlier, I was a Senior Research Associate under the OCaml Labs initiative at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, an 1851 Research Fellow and a Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. Earlier, I was a graduate student at Purdue University where I obtained an MS and a PhD degree in Computer Science under the supervision of the wonderful Prof. Suresh Jagannathan. Before that, I obtained my BEng degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Anna University, India.

I write about my research in my blog (though not as often as I would like to).

• CV
• Research Statement
• Publications

Latest News

• [Jan 25] Teaching Programs and Proofs again.
• [Dec 24] Serving on the PaPoC 2025 PC.
• [Dec 24] Serving on the ICFP 2025 PC.
• [Dec 24] Serving as an Associate Editor for OOPSLA 2025.

Activities

• DEI Co-Chair: ICFP 2025.
• Associate Editor: OOPSLA 2025.
• Streeing committee member:
  • ICFP, Member at Large, serving 9/2023 – 9/2027
  • Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC)
  • ML workshop, 2019 – 2022
• Editor – JFP Special Issue on Effect Handlers
• Organizer
  • First OCaml Retreat at Auroville, 2024
  • Shonan meeting on “Programming Language support for Data-intensive Systems”, 2019
  • Dagstuhl meeting on “Effect Handlers go Mainstream!”, 2018
• PC Chair – PaPoC’22, ML’19
• AEC Chair – ESOP’22
• PC member
  • 2025: FunArch’25, ICFP’25, PaPoC’25, APLAS’25
  • 2024: OOPSLA’24, PaPoC’24, POPL’24, TFP’24, PEPM’24
  • 2023: PLDI’23
  • 2022: OCaml’22, ML’22, PEPM’22, PLDI’22
  • 2021: GPCE’21, TyDe’21, PaPoC’21, PADL’21
  • 2020: ICFP’20, PaPoC’20
  • 2019: OCaml’19
  • 2017: PMLDC’17, OBT’17
  • 2016: OCaml’16
  • 2013: Splash-MARC symposium ‘13.
• Expert Reviewer
  • 2023: POPL’23, PPoPP’23
• ERC member – ICFP’19
• AEC member – ICFP’18, PPoPP/CGO’16, PLDI’15
• Invited meetings
  • Dagstuhl meeting on “Utilising and Scaling the WebAssembly Semantics”, 2025
  • Observer, WG 2.1, Canberra, 2024 (Declined due to personal reasons)
  • Guest, WG 2.8, Utrecht, 2024
  • Dagstuhl meeting on “Foundation of WebAssembly”, 2023
  • Dagstuhl meeting on “Scalable handling of effects”, 2021
  • Dagstuhl meeting on “From Theory to Practice of Algebraic Effects and Handlers”, 2016

Contact

• Email : kcsrk@cse.iitm.ac.in (used for academic work), kc@tarides.com, kc@kcsrk.info
• IRL : Tarides, Chennai
• Twitter : @kc_srk (aiming to use less of this in favour of ↓)
• Bluesky : @kcsrk.info
• Github : kayceesrk
• BitBucket : kayceesrk