Charith Mendis
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to that, I was a visiting faculty researcher at Google Brain. My broad interests are at the intersection of compilers, program optimization and machine learning. I lead the ADAPT lab. Our current work is focused on two main fronts.
- Automated compiler construction using machine learning and formal reasoning techniques targeting both commodity hardware and domain specific accelerators as well as diverse workloads.
- High-performance compilation and program optimization techniques for machine learning and data science workloads.
New! I am actively hiring PhD students for Fall 2025 cycle. Candidates should have strong background in compilers with either formal methods or machine learning expertise. We will be specifically focusing on tensor compilers such as XLA, TorchInductor that power modern Deep Learning applications. Details on how to apply can be found here
Office: 4118, Siebel Center for Computer Science
201 N. Goodwin Ave., Urbana IL 61801
Email: charithm (at) illinois.edu
Research Opportunities
ADAPT lab has opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. If you are a student who is passionate about building high performance ML optimization or compilation techniques or is passionate about automated compiler construction techniques using either machine learning or formal methods, please be in touch with me.
Click to read instructions before contacting me.
Undergraduates or Master's students at UIUC:
Please include a CV, an up-to-date transcript, and your programming experience. The subject line should contain the word "prospective undergraduate/master's researcher" to indicate these instructions have been read. Please note that, since we are doing systems work at least 2 semesters worth of commitment is required to get fruitful results (e.g. a publication) out of your experience. Also, I will not agree to supervise any final year Master's students.
Prospective PhD students:
First, you must apply and gain admission to the graduate program in Computer Science at UIUC. You should mention me as a potential advisor in your application as well as in your personal statement. Once you apply, you can optionally send me an email with subject "prospective PhD student". If you are admitted, then I'm happy to discuss supervision.
News
| Dec 18, 2024 | New! 1 paper accepted (congrats Avaljot!) and 1 paper conditionally accepted at OOPSLA 2025! |
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| Nov 12, 2024 | New! Paper on our TensorRight project was accepted at POPL 2025. Congratulations to Jai and Devansh! |
| Oct 21, 2024 | New! We presented a tutorial on Temporal Graph Learning algorithms and systems. |
| Oct 09, 2024 | PI Mendis receives the DARPA Young Faculty Award. |
| Sep 20, 2024 | Invited talk at IBM on “Towards automated construction of compilers” |
Funding
I am truly thankful for the sponsors of our research at the ADAPT lab. In particular, we are partially funded by the ACE center, one of the seven centers in JUMP 2.0, a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) program sponsored by DARPA, by National Science Foundation (NSF) and through generous gifts from Google, Intel and Qualcomm.
