Arjun Vedantham

I am an ECE PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. William Moses in the Program geNeration Transformation and Optimization (PRONTO) Lab. Broadly, my research interests lie at the intersection of compilers, programming languages, and computer architecture/hardware design.

Previously, I completed my bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a major in computer science and a minor in robotics and autonomous systems. I was also a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz in the Hardware Systems Collective.

While at UMD, I was an undergraduate researcher in robotics, advised by Prof. Mumu Xu in the Maryland Robotics Center. Additionally, I contributed to the design of CMSC141, a new introductory computer science course sequence, led by Prof. David Van Horn and Jose Calderon. At UCSC, I worked on benchmarking and accelerating synchronization barriers for multicore CPUs under the direction of Prof. Scott Beamer.

I was also a member of UMD Loop, an undergraduate engineering team, where I led the software and (later) avionics systems teams for building both a tunnel boring machine and a Mars rover. I continue to serve as a mentor and external reviewer for the team.

Work Experience

Are you hiring for summer 2026? If so, please reach out!

• Winter 2025: Teaching assistant, CSE 156 (Network Programming) at UC Santa Cruz
• Summer 2023, 2024, and 2025: Research Intern in the Electronic Systems division of Two Six Technologies
  • 2025: High Assurance Solutions
  • 2024: Deployed Systems
  • 2023: Exploitation and Vulnerability Solutions
• Spring 2023: Course/curriculum design for CMSC141 @ UMD
• Summer 2022: EERE Robotics Research Intern in the Advanced Mobility Technology Laboratory of Argonne National Laboratory.
• Summer 2019, 2020, and 2021: Web developer intern at IPVM.

From 2014 to 2017, I was a community leader for DuckDuckHack, the open source community of DuckDuckGo. Maybe you’ve used one of my instant answers?

Recent News

• October 2025: Presented at the Calyx group meeting on Zinnia
• September 2025: Moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• June 2025 - August 2025: Year 3 at Two Six Technologies.
• June 2025: Attended OPLSS 2025
• November 2024: Assisted with WOSET 2024
• October 2024: Attended PLMW @ SPLASH 2024
• September 2024: Started PhD @ UC Santa Cruz
• June 2024 - August 2024: Year 2 at Two Six Technologies.
• May 2024/June 2024: Attended SSFT 24, and presented some of my internship work from summer 2023 on finding vulnerabilities in UEFI implementations during the student talks section.
• May 2024: Attended NJPLS at NYU

Current Projects

• Zinnia: An experiment in parallel algorithms and DSL design. This grew out of a class project in CMSC838L (Programming Languages and Architectures) with Yusuf Bham at UMD in spring 2024. As of September 2025, this is inactive, though Yusuf and I are trying to get back to this. :)
  • October 2025: Presented at the Calyx group meeting

Presentations and Other Written Works

• (My) Uncovering Exploitable Firmware Internship, Pt. 2 - continuing my work on the DARPA HARDEN program at Two Six
  • This slide deck was made with manim-slides. You can use the arrows keys to navigate between each slide/transition.
• Zinnia: A (questionable) experiment in DSL design and parallel algorithms for signal processing - presented as part of our final project for CMSC838L: Programming Languages and Architectures in spring 2024.
  • Our final report is available here
• (My) Uncovering Exploitable Firmware Internship - finding vulnerabilities in UEFI images as part of DARPA’s HARDEN project (work at Two Six Technologies over summer 2023). Presented internally at Two Six and at SSFT 24’s student talks session.
• SDR Based Robotic Navigation: An Update - a computer scientist tries to do RF research
• CAN2Serial - implementing a CAN based robotic driver system for vehicle testing at Argonne National Laboratory, over summer 2022.

Contact

• Email: arjunsv2 [at] illinois.edu
• Mastodon (mostly private): @javathunderman@discuss.systems

I generally go by javathunderman online, which is an anagram of my name.