Charith Mendis

I lead the ADAPT lab at UIUC. 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.
Office: 4118, Siebel Center for Computer Science
201 N. Goodwin Ave., Urbana IL 61801
Email: charithm (at) illinois.edu
Bio
Charith Mendis is an Assistant Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His broad research interests are at the intersection of compilers, program optimization and machine learning. He received his Ph.D. and Master’s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.Sc. from the University of Moratuwa. He recently co-led the DARPA ISAT study on “ML Optimized Compilers for Heterogeneous Architectures (MOCHA).” He is the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award, an NSF CAREER Award, the William A. Martin outstanding master’s thesis award at MIT and the university gold medal for his B.Sc. He has won numerous paper awards including a Distinguished Paper Award at POPL, a Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE BigData conference, an honorable mention for the Best Artifact Award at SIGMOD, a Best Paper Award at ML for Systems workshop at ISCA and an IEEE Top Picks Honorable Mention.
New! Check out our new course on CS521: ML and compilers
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
Mar 30, 2025 | New! 1 paper accepted at PLDI 2025! |
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Mar 15, 2025 | New! Dias receives an honorable mention for the Best Artifact Award at SIGMOD 2025! |
Jan 31, 2025 | New! Our paper on Approximate Query Processing, PilotDB, has been accepted at SIGMOD 2025. |
Jan 14, 2025 | New! TensorRight receives a distinguished paper award at POPL 2025! |
Dec 18, 2024 | 2 papers accepted at OOPSLA 2025! |
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.