Rachit Nigam

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. His research is supported through the Jane Street Fellowship.

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).

Mar ’23
Nov ’22

Invited talks at Williams College and Microsoft Research.

Oct ’22

Member of the External Review Committee at OOPSLA 23.

Sep ’22

Paper on Cider, a stepwise debugger for Calyx, conditionally accepted to ASPLOS 2023.

Jul ’22

Gave invited talks on Calyx at the MathWorks Code Generation Forum.

Publications

Conferences

Workshop & Short Papers

Posts

Sep ’22
Why Study Programming Languages
PhD candidate proselytizes
Aug ’22
Lies Academics Believe
PhD candidate looks into a mirror
Jan ’22
Dear Sir, You Have Built a Compiler
Sweetly addressed to those who did not want to build a compiler
Jan ’22
Personal Infrastructure for PhD Students
PhD candidate provides ways to procrastinate
Mar ’21
Commoditize the Complement of Your Research
PhD student espouses economic theories he does not understand.