Team

Faculty

Bahar Asgari is an assistant professor in the department of computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), with a joint appointment at UMIACS and an affiliation with ECE. Prior to UMD, she spent a year on Google's Systems and Services Infrastructure team, focusing on improving the performance of Google's systems and establishing strategies to balance various trade-offs, particularly in optimizing memory utilization, cost, and reliability. She earned her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech in 2021. During her PhD, Bahar was selected as a Rising Star in EECS in 2019 . Asgari’s doctoral dissertation, in consultation with her advisors Prof. Yalamanchili and Prof. Kim, focuses on efficiently improving the performance of sparse problems. Asgari is a recipient of the DoE Early Career Award 2023.

Students

Star Paladins

Donghyeon Joo is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science. Prior to embarking on his Ph.D. journey, he earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Korea University in 2023, during which time he developed a fascination for computer architecture and deep learning. As he begins his academic journey at UMD, Donghyeon looks forward to creating a domain-specific architecture that enhances artifial intelligence.

Helia Hosseini is a Ph.D. student the Department of Computer Science. Helia received her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from University of Tehran. Her current area of research centers around computer architecture, with a special emphasis on delving into the intricacies of FPGAs. Helia is enthusiastic about gaining more in-depth knowledge and experience working with FPGAs as part of her academic journey.

Ubaid Bakhtiar is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his B.Sc in electrical engineering from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan in 2022. His research area lies in domain-specific architecture (DSA). Currently, he is working to accelerate sparse algebra. Ubaid is interested in broadening his research horizons within DSA during his Ph.D. journey while exploring areas such as near-memory processing, machine learning algorithms, memory systems, and GPUs. By doing so, he seeks to make valuable contributions that enhance the speed and performance of computer systems. His hobbies include reading fictional books of different genres, travelling, working out and a little bit of gaming.

Sanjali Yadav is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science. She received her Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland, during which she developed a passion for Computer Architecture and Machine Learning. She is enthusiastic about exploring load balancing methods in sparse matrix multiplication workloads and intelligent reconfigurability, enabling hardware to dynamically adapt to various applications based on predictive analysis.

Amirmahdi Namjoo is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science. He is interested in different areas of computer systems, including but not limited to computer architecture, high-performance computing, and operating systems. Alongside his academic pursuits, Amirmahdi's passion for teaching shines through, as evidenced by his previous roles as a TA for several courses during his Bachelor's studies. Outside the realms of computer science, his interests extend to astronomy and astrophysics. In his free time, he enjoys single-player, story-driven video games.

Alex Coppens is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science. He completed his undergraduate studies in Computer Science at UMD in Spring 2023 along with a second degree in Mathematics. His research interests include FPGA prototyping for hardware accelerating algorithms and Domain-Specific Architectures. Alex looks forward to learning more about reconfigurability and efficient computing. His other academic interests include Theory of Computation and Mathematical Logic. Alex's main hobbies are working out and playing guitar.

Johnson Umeike is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science. He holds an MSc in Computer Engineering from the University of Kansas and a Bachelor's degree from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria. During his master's studies, Johnson focused on enhancing the performance of computer architecture simulators. His research interests span computer architecture, high-performance computing (HPC), operating systems, computer networking, and machine learning. He is particularly passionate about hardware-software co-design and domain-specific architectures, leveraging novel reconfigurable architectures to accelerate critical HPC and ML tasks.

Alireza Borhani is joining the Department of Computer Science in Fall 2024 as a Ph.D. Student. He holds an M.Sc. in computer engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. During his master's studies, Alireza delved into various aspects of computer architecture, further fueling his desire to pursue a Ph.D. and contribute to the field on a deeper level. His research interests encompass the fusion of computer architecture and machine learning, focusing on enhancing the efficiency of machine learning applications on resource-constrained smart devices. As he embarks on his Ph.D. journey, Alireza is eager to explore domain-specific architectures to address the challenges in this domain effectively.

Paladins

Current Members

Hana Chitsaz is pursuing a Master’s degree in the Department of Computer Science at UMD. She completed her undergraduate studies in computer science at UMD in December of 2023 with minors in Business Analytics and Persian Studies. Hana’s research with CASL is currently focused on accelerating recommendation systems, but she is also interested in exploring various intersections with data science and machine learning. She has a passion for teaching and has been a teaching assistant for numerous classes. In her spare time, she plays the violin, dances, and travels.

Tien Vu is a Master's student in the Department of Computer Science at UMD, where he also completed his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a focus on cybersecurity and a minor in General Business. Tien's interests lie in computer systems and architectures and is currently interested in the role RISC ISAs such as ARM and RISC-V have for the future of general-purpose and domain-specific computing. Outside of academia, Tien is a member of the Cybersecurity Club and enjoys building PCs and self-hosting web services.

Alumni

Jerry Gui was a Master’s student at the Department of Computer science who also attended the University of Maryland from Fall 2020 to Spring 2023 for a Bachelors, majoring in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. Jerry was a member of bicycle club and did some racing in Spring 2024. Jerry listens to a lot of Japanese Anime music.

Jason Zhang was a Master's student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. His Bachelor's degree was also from UMD (Go Terp!), with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Statistics. His main interests are in data analysis and machine learning, but he believes that being a graduate student means learning about a variety of topics instead of being fixated on a single one. As such, he has dabbled in computer vision, computer graphics, and cybersecurity. At CASL, we worked on analyzing sparse problems and matrix features to optimize performance.

Knight Captains

Current Members

Nebil Ozer is an undergraduate at UMD with research interest in Computer Architecture and Domain-Specific Accelerators (Specifically in relation to Machine Learning), and personal interest in video games, scenic walks, and good food.

Former Members

Nicole Tran was an undergraduate sophomore at UMD studying Information Science. She is interested in applications of machine learning in data science.

Bodhi Saha was a rising sophomore at UMD pursuing an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. He is interested in the fields of machine learning and general algorithms, but is also keen on understanding and enhancing the performance of these tools by delving into the applications of computer architecture.

Victor Liu was an undergraduate student at UMD studying Computer Engineering. He is interested in computer architecture, computer systems, and FPGAs, as well as the applications of the fields for high-performance computing.

Srishti Kalepu was an undergraduate senior studying Computer Science with a minor in Geospatial Information Science (GIS). She is interested in learning more about computer architecture, compilers, security and privacy, and hardware/software co-design. Her research interests are, but not limited to, sparse matrix computations and implications of security within hardware systems.

Robert Appel was an undergraduate student studying Computer Science. He was primarily interested in the applications of computer architecture and data science. As an intern, Robert worked on virtual-reality based physics and training simulations as well as synthetic data generation using machine learning techniques .

Nate Schnitzer was a undergraduate junior studying Computer Science and Math. His main interests are cybersecurity, reverse engineering, and computation theory. In his previous internship/research experiences, Nate worked on embedded reverse engineering, quantum computing, exploitation analysis, and natural language parsing. He intends to pursue a career in Cybersecurity Research and Development.

Interns

Current Members

Radin Shahdaei is an undergraduate in Computer Engineering in SUT. He is passionate about Computer Architecture with a specific interest in the optimization of systems. He also enjoys other fields of computer science, including Algorithms and Theoretical Machine Learning.

Former Members