Arjun Vedantham
I am a CSE PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, advised by Prof. Scott Beamer in the Vertical Architectures, Memory, and Algorithms group, part of the Hardware Systems Collective. Broadly, my research interests lie at the intersection of programming languages and computer architecture.
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. 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.
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.
Work Experience
- Summer 2023 & 2024: Research Intern in the Electronic Systems division of Two Six Technologies
- 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
- November 2024: Attending + assisting with WOSET 2024
- October 2024: Attended PLMW @ SPLASH 2024
- September 2024: Started PhD @ UC Santa Cruz
- June 2024 - August 2024: Returned to 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.
Presentations and Other Written Works
- 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: avedanth [at] ucsc.edu
- On campus: E2-207
I generally go by javathunderman online, which is an anagram of my name.
