Rachit Nigam

Rachit Nigam Pronunciation: Ruh-CHITH NI-gum. First name rhymes with “crutch-it”. is a visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL working with Jonathan Ragan-Kelley and a PhD candidate at [Cornell University][cornell] working with Adrian Sampson.

His research (Filament, Calyx, Dahlia) is focused on building high-level programming models for designing hardware accelerators and is supported through the Jane Street Fellowship. He has previously been affiliated with the UW PLSE lab, Brown’s PLT group, and the PLASMA research group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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).

Apr ’23

Gave an invited talk on Dahlia at MIT’s PL Review.

Apr ’23

Gave a talk on Filament at LatchUp ’23.

Mar ’23

Our paper Stepwise Debugging for Hardware Accelerators won the distinguished artifact award at ASPLOS ’23.

Mar ’23

Awarded the Jane Street Fellowship.

Nov ’22

Invited talks at Williams College and Microsoft Research.

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.