About Me

Bio

I am a rising senior majoring in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with interests in security, systems, and CS education. On campus, I've been involved in research, teaching, and the student community. I currently work on security research at the FPSG, where I study microarchitectural side-channel attacks. I am a lead course assistant for Illinois CS 241: System Programming. In the past, I've helped organize HackIllinois and the Reflections | Projections technology conference. I've had industry experience through software engineering internships at Facebook (*), Salesforce, and Virtusa.

I'm open to hearing about research projects and internships relating to computer science, especially relating to security and distributed systems. If you are interested working with me, or discussing professional opportunities, feel free to email or use the contact form at the end of this page.

Meeting me / getting in touch

If you'd like to get to know me personally or meet me (e.g. just to chat, or for a meal), I welcome such opportunities; you can schedule time with me here. Please be sure to leave a short note about yourself and why you'd like to meet me. Short of that, feel free to add me on Facebook (again, with a note, please), or email me. I love meeting new people, and find cultivating good relationships with people to be a source of strength.

Things I enjoy talking about

Board game strategies, bubble tea places around the world, education, electronic music, investing, mental health, music production, philosophy, productivity tips, psychology, romantic relationships, startups, table tennis, tech news, VC, and of course, anything and everything computer science.

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Research

Talks

  1. PRISM: Protections Impeding Side-channel Attacks in Microarchitecture , Undergraduate Research Symposium, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, August 2020

  2. Broadway: Scaling Programming Education Through a Distributed Autograding Framework , Illinois Computer Science Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), April 2020

Experience

Facebook Software Engineering Intern · September 2020 - December 2020

Coding Together Section Leader, CS 50: Introduction to Computer Science · June 2020 - August 2020

  • A Stanford Rebuild project offering free computer science education during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Lead weekly section teaching students C programming

Stanford University Section Leader, CS 106A: Programming Methodologies · April 2020 - June 2020

  • Instructors: Prof. Chris Piech and Prof. Mehran Sahami
  • Lead weekly section teaching students introductory Python programming
  • Prepared mini-lectures to re-iterate concepts, faciltated pair programming exercises for practice, and provided instruction in code decomposition and best practices in code style
  • Answer student questions on online Q&A forum Ed
  • Discussed CS applications for people outside the tech industry, and potential next steps for deepening knowledge in the field

FPSG, Security and Privacy Research at Illinois Research Assistant · August 2019 - Present

  • Advisor: Prof. Christopher W. Fletcher
  • Investigating the effects of dynamic overclocking and cache compression on memory access times.
  • Evaluating dynamic information flow tracking (DIFT) tools to protect against leakage of confidential data
  • Studying how modern computer architectural features such as speculative execution, dynamic branch prediction, and out of order execution make hardware increasingly prone to microarchitectural cache, timing, and contention-based side-channel attacks
  • Analyzing the efficacy of security measures such as Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), Oblivious RAM, and cache / processor pinning
  • Performing extensive literature surveys of adjacent fields, and proposed hardware optimizations to find shortcomings in state-of-the-art techniques in secure processor design
  • Learning to use tools such as the GEM5 simulator, Intel VTune for analyzing the program control flow, and static/dynamic code analyzers

Blender Lab, NLP Research at Illinois Research Assistant · August 2019 - December 2019

  • Advisor: Prof. Heng Ji
  • Conducting literature survey on event schema induction from multi-{media, lingual} representations using graph neural nets (GNNs).
  • Annotating videos for Yoga Robot, and learning more about the benefits of Attention Models and Transformers in encoding long-term phrase dependencies.

Salesforce Software Engineering Intern · June 2019 - August 2019

  • Created web app to automatically suggest test plans for a new user story, through natural language processing of the acceptance criteria, using JavaScript (ES2017), Apex, SOQL, Web Components, and Jest for unit tests.
  • Reduced 13 engineering work days spent manually compiling test plans per sprint planning session.
  • Developed UI for Einstein Modeling’s first Business Card Scanner, that uses OCR and Named Entity Recognition to automate the organization of business contact information.
  • Ideated and built intern-matching social app using Python and Jinja, that helps bolster personal connections and surfaces common interests.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Lead Course Assistant, CS 241: System Programming · January 2019 - Present

  • Instructor: Prof. Lawrence Angrave
  • Recipient of Outstanding Course Assistant award by the Department of Computer Science, for my efforts at improving the course
  • Lead the assignment development team, continually updating assignments, and ensuring they help meet learning objectives
  • Teach a lab section, conduct office hours, and develop assignments to help students learn Linux system programming concepts
  • Contribute content to and maintain course textbook and website, and conduct technical and behavioral interviews for prospective staff members
  • Teach a lab section, conduct office hours, manage course logistics, onboard and mentor new staff, and answer student questions on online Q&A platform

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Course Assistant, CS 233: Computer Architecture · August 2018 - December 2018

  • Instructor: Prof. Geoffrey L. Herman
  • Lead a problem-solving discussion section, and conduct office hours, helping students reinforce their understanding of computer architecture concepts, such as combinatorial and sequential logic, machine datapath, instruction set architectures, instruction level parallelism, vectorization, caching, and code optimization

Virtusa Software Engineering Intern · July 2018 - August 2018

  • Created serverless cloud app and supporting data lake to model, process, and aggregate computer vision data for predictive analytics, using Python, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB
  • Implemented reference business intelligence (BI) tool, using NLP generative models (LDA, NTM) to gain insights on social media reactions to popular films and TV shows, using Boto 3, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon SageMaker

HackIllinois Systems Staff · April 2018 - February 2019

  • Developed Go microservices to enable user authentication, authorization, event registration, and notifications via mobile app clients, including CI / CD pipeline (Travis, AWS CodePipeline, Amazon ECS).
  • Added features such as user mocking, OAuth single sign-on, multi-tier decision review, templated mail, error handling and CRUD (with MongoDB).
  • Created QR code scanner in Android app to manage event check-in and track participant statistics for meals and mini-events.
  • Used MkDocs, a Markdown documentation generator to create a dedicated documentation website for API consumers.

Reflections | Projections Lead Web Developer · January 2018 - September 2018

  • Principal full-stack developer of website written in ES6 using ReactJS, Webpack, and Nginx.
  • Integrated microservices-based in-house registration API that brought in 2200+ applicants.
  • Mentored junior developers through code review and pair programming.

Ashwini Charitable Trust
Web Development Volunteer · April 2016 - May 2016

  • Built mockups of proposed new website from scratch.
  • Migrated website to Wordpress, to allow anyone to create and update content without having to resort to technical tools.
  • Incorporated search engine optimization to better target volunteers and potential donors.

Music

I am deeply passionate about music, of which I enjoy both listening and performing aspects. Although I frequently explore new styles, my go-to genres are Western art music, rock, tropical house, and big room house. I have been playing the piano for several years and have tried my hand at production. Enjoy listening to some of my early efforts at digital music composition. Feel free to follow my Spotify.

Contact Me