Academic

Competitive Programming

I started competitive programming when I joined IIIT in 2020. I actively participated in contests during my college years, and was peak rated Master on Codeforces (akcube - 2114) (active India rank ~50). I also participated in ICPC during this time. My team fightFight qualified for the Asia-West continent finals in 2022, where we ranked 19th. We lost World Finals due to missing a single “-1” in code, but that’s something I’ll keep crying about :) We’ve also placed 9th in the Amritapuri regional in 2023.

I have also been the IIIT-H Programming Club coordinator for 4 years. During this time, I designed and hosted the programming club website. I also was part of the team that set 2 contests on Codeforces (Codeforces Round 940 (Div. 2) and CodeCraft-23 and CodeCraft-22 and Codeforces Round 795 (Div. 2) which had around ~20k and ~30k participants respectively. Apart from this, I also founded the Indian Competitive Programming Camp and successfully completed it’s first iteration, garnering over 2k participants across the country’s best institutes.

High Performance Computing

I was also one of the members of the IIIT-H Theory Group where I primarily pursued my interests in HPC & systems. I’m a huge fan of C++, and have contributed to implementing par_unseq and unseq execution policies for a stdlib implementation during GSoC - Project Outline. I also worked on heavily optimizing my own BLAS implementation, a journey which I documented here (Will hopefully move this out of notion soon!). Apart from this, I’ve also worked on optimizing algorithms in the Bio-Informatics space for efficient execution using SIMD. One example is my work with Vidit Jain on achieving a 33x performance increase from row-optimized Needleman-Wunsch, which you can find here. Am currently working on optimizing the STAR DNA Sequence Aligner with Intel.

Teaching

I first heard this from Anurudh Peduri,

“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” - George Bernard Shaw

Jokes aside, I do love teaching. I’ve taken multiple lectures on topics ranging from C++ STL to Network Flow algorithms to audiences of 50-100+ people as part of Programming Club. Some of these meets may have been recorded / for a national audience as part of the ICPC Camp I conducted. Ex: Centroid Decomposition, Auxillary Trees - Kishore Kumar. Apart from that, I’ve also taken a few meets on Bloom Filters, HPC, etc.

Trading / ML

New interest. I’ve been trading for a couple of years now and done pretty decent. Exploring some famous problems in this space (asset allocation, options theory, etc.) to see if I can build something cool. Very much a WIP.

Hobbies

Gaming

I love playing Counter Strike & Rocket League. Started FPS journey with a game called Black Squad. I total some 2000 hours across FPS games. My peak rank was Nova-3 in CS:GO and Diamond 2 in Rocket League. Am considerably worse in both at the moment :( I know mobile gaming isn’t gaming, but I did hit Champion 2 in RL Sideswipe! Apart from that, recently started playing chess. I’m terrible at it, but might grind for a bit.

Sports

I played football quite actively in school and was one of the goalkeepers for my school cluster team. In college, I was a part of our house team and we won the house cup in my second year. I dropped off after that. I’ve tried volleyball and quite like it, but don’t pursue it competitively. I don’t watch sports actively but do keep tabs on my favorite teams: Real Madrid (Football), CSK (IPL) & India (World Cup / Test).

Dance

I love dancing. I find it hard to allocate time for this sadly, but love performing on a big stage given the opportunity. Here’s the first and only time I really got to go all out on a stage. That’s Manav on the left, huge props to him, I’m not trained by any means so he played a huge part in making this happen.