Rachit Nigam

Hi! I’m Rachit Nigam Pronunciation: Ruh-CHITH NI-gum. First name rhymes with “crutch-it”. a visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL working with Jonathan Ragan-Kelley and a PhD candidate at Cornell University working with Adrian Sampson. I will be on the academic and industrial research job market in the 2023-24 cycle. My statement overviews some of my research interests.

My research (Filament, Calyx, Dahlia) is focused on building high-level programming models for designing hardware accelerators and is supported through the Jane Street Fellowship. I’ve previously been a visiting scholar at the UW PLSE lab and Brown’s PLT group, and did my undergraduate research at the PLASMA research group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

I 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

SNAPL  ’17

Posts

Sep ’23
GitHub-centric Research Management
PhD student is an issue triager
Sep ’23
Your Eternal Spark
I don't have words to put here
Aug ’23
Transpiler, a meaningless word
PhD Student fights the good fight
Jul ’23
The Stateless Manager
PhD student is not forgetful; just sage
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