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 from September 2024 through June 2025.

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!

• 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
• Winter 2025: Teaching assistant, CSE 156 (Network Programming) at UC Santa Cruz
• 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

• March 2026: Paper accepted to the LATTE workshop! I will discuss ongoing work to bring choreographic programming techniques into hardware design.
• October 2025: Presented at the Calyx group meeting on Zinnia
• September 2025: Moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Current Projects

• Verification oriented MLIR dialects in Enzyme-JAX
• Choreographic programming for hardware design

Papers and Presentations

• Towards Choreographic Programming for Hardware Design (LATTE 2026)
• (My) Uncovering Exploitable Firmware Internship, Pt. 2 - continued work on the DARPA HARDEN program at Two Six
  • This slide deck was made with manim-slides. You can use the arrow keys to navigate between each slide/transition.
• Zinnia: A (questionable) experiment in DSL design and parallel algorithms for signal processing, with Yusuf Bham
  • Presented as part of our final project for CMSC838L: Programming Languages and Architectures in spring 2024 (instructor: Prof. Milijana Surbatovich)
  • 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.

Conferences

• ASPLOS 2026
• SPLASH 2024 (as part of PLMW)

Summer Schools & Other Meetings

• OPLSS 2025
• SSFT 24
• WOSET 2024 (as workshop assistant/Zoom czar)
• NJPLS (May 2024 and October 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.