Rachit Nigam Pronunciation: Ruh-CHITH NI-gum. First name rhymes with “crutch-it”. is a visiting researcher in the PLSE group at University of Washington and a PhD candidate studying computer science at Cornell University.
He is a part of the CAPRA and PL@Cornell research groups and is advised by Adrian Sampson. His research (Dahlia, Calyx) is focused on building high-level programming models for designing hardware accelerators. He previously worked in the PLASMA research group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with Arjun Guha.
Rachit started PLTea during PLDI ’20 in hopes of keeping social interactions alive during virtual conferences. PLTea has since been organized several times (PLDI ’22, ICFP ’21, SPLASH ’21, PLDI ’21) and has inspired spin-offs in other communities (ArchChat).
Invited talks at Williams College and Microsoft Research.
Member of the External Review Committee at OOPSLA 23.
Paper on Cider, a stepwise debugger for Calyx, conditionally accepted to ASPLOS 2023.
Gave invited talks on Calyx at the MathWorks Code Generation Forum.
Gave invited talks on Calyx at Xilinx research labs and Google.