I’m a guy with a thing for (functional) programming.

I’ve just started as a postdoc in Klaus von Gleissenthall’s PL security group at VU Amsterdam, where I’ll be working on applying PL for problems in security. (And hopefully hacking on a lot of Haskell.)

I did my PhD at DIKU, the computer science department at the University of Copenhagen (supervised by Fritz Henglein, Cosmin E. Oancea, and Troels Henriksen). I spent most of my PhD working on Futhark, a statically-typed functional array programming language.

Research

Under Review

1. Robin Webbers, Robert Schenck, Alp Adnan Basar, Kristina Sojakova, Klaus v. Gleissenthall. Pantomime: Simulation-Based Leakage Proofs for Hardware Side-Channel Security.

2. Nikolaj Hey Hinnerskov, Robert Schenck, Cosmin Oancea. Verifying Array Properties in Pure Data-Parallel Programs.

Published

3. AUTOMAP: Inferring Rank-Polymorphic Function Applications with Integer Linear Programming. Robert Schenck, Nikolaj Hey Hinnerskov, Troels Henriksen, Magnus Madsen, Martin Elsman. OOPSLA 24 (pdf)

4. AD for an Array Language with Nested Parallelism. Robert Schenck, Ola Rønning, Troels Henriksen, Cosmin Oancea. SC 22 (pdf, bib, artifact)

5. Combinatory Adjoints and Differentiation. Martin Elsman, Fritz Henglein, Robin Kaarsgaard, Mikkel K. Mathiesen, and Robert Schenck. MSFP 22 (pdf)

Education

• University of Copenhagen (Copenhagen, Denmark)
  Thesis: Two Things I Did: Parallel Differentiation and Rank Polymorphism (pdf)
  PhD Computer Science (2025)

• Max Planck Research School for Computer Science (Saarbrücken, Germany)
  Thesis: Sum types in Futhark (pdf)
  MSc Computer Science (2020)

• Brown University (Providence, RI)
  BA Physics (2015)

Talks

• Two Things I Did. PhD Defense. March 18, 2025. (slides)

• AUTOMAP: Inferring Rank-Polymorphic Function Applications with Integer Linear Programming:

  • Talk at OOPSLA 24 (slides).
  • Invited talk at IMDEA (slides).
  • Extended abstract talk at ARRAY 24 (slides).

• AD for an Array Language with Nested Parallelism. SC 22 (slides)

Writing

• AUTOMAP: How to do NumPy-style Broadcasting in Futhark (but better)

Teaching

I was a teaching assistant in serveral courses at the University of Copenhagen:

• Advanced Programming (2018, 2020, 2024)
• Data Parallel Programming (2021)

I also co-supervised (with Fritz Henglein) a couple of MSc theses:

• Trine Dag Randløv: Toward a Monadic Functional Machine Model for Computability and Complexity Theory: Finite and Pushdown Automata (2023)

• Ulrik Elmelund Petersen and Einar Rasmussen: Design and Implementation of a Compiler for Fréchet (2022)

Extras

• I’m an FAA-licensed VFR and IFR airplane pilot.

• I have dual US-German citizenship.