Tushaar Gangavarapu
MS CS student at Cornell University
Contact: tg352@cornell.edu (by email), or 456 Gates Hall in person
"[...] But intellectual honesty is more than just acknowledging the work of others and not outsourcing your commencement speech to a neural network. It's also about presenting work in an unbiased manner, about making compelling arguments without misleading, not confusing wanting something to be true really, really badly with it actually being true. [...] There's a fascinating and scientifically very significant instance of intellectual honesty in Newton's understanding of gravity." —Prof. Alyssa Apsel, ECE graduation ceremony, May 2023
I am an MS CS student at Cornell University (Ithaca), advised by Alexander "Sasha" Rush. My work is at the intersection of alternate-attention (for large language models), ML systems, and mechanistic interpretability:
:: ML systems: Hardware-aware kernels (in Triton)
:: Mechanistic interpretability: Sparse autoencoders to understand the role of recurrence in linear recurrence models
Please see my GitHub and research pages to learn more about my current projects. I no longer actively work on pre-2022 research noted on my research page (e.g., healthcare analytics). To this end, I believe there are more qualified experts in those areas, and as such, I may not be able to respond if you are reaching out regarding extensions of that earlier work.
If you're a Cornell undergrad and interested in any of my work (or want to discuss CS4740 or related topics), feel free to reach out! I'm generally proactive with emails and happy to talk about (my) research.
Research interests. NLP :: LLM :: alternate-attention :: efficiency, mechanistic interpretability
Recognition. For my contributions to CS4740 (and cross-listings) in fall 2022 and 2023, and CS4300 (and cross-listings) in spring 2022 and 2023, I was awarded the Bowers CIS Best TA Award.
Timeline.
| 08/2024–01/2025: | Head TA, Practicum in AI (CS4701) Fa24, Cornell University, Ithaca |
| 05/2024–08/2024: | Research Intern (Advisor: Sasha Rush, Project: Mechanistic interpretability), Cornell Tech, NYC |
| 01/2023–05/2023: | Head TA, Language and Information (CS/INFO4300) Sp24, Cornell University, Ithaca |
| 08/2023–01/2024: | Head TA, Natural Language Processing (CS4740/LING4744/COGST4740/CS5740) Fa23, Cornell University, Ithaca |
| 05/2023–08/2023: | Research Intern (Advisor: Sasha Rush, Project: Authorship identification), Cornell Tech, NYC |
| 01/2023–05/2023: | Head TA, Language and Information (CS4300/INFO4300) Sp23, Cornell University, Ithaca |
| 08/2022–01/2023: | Grad TA, Natural Language Processing (CS4740/LING4744/COGST4740/CS5740) Fa22, Cornell University, Ithaca |
| 08/2022–now: | MS CS Student (Major: Computer Science, Minor: Applied Math), Cornell University, Ithaca |
| 09/2021–08/2022: | Applied Scientist, Kindle Content Experience and Quality Algorithms, Amazon |
| 12/2019–09/2021: | Research Engineer, Kindle Content Experience and Quality Algorithms, Amazon |
| 06/2019–12/2019: | Software Development Engineer, Worldwide Deals, Consumer Engagement, Amazon |
| 08/2018–12/2019: | Scientific Researcher at Human-Centered Computing Group and Healthcare Analytics and Language Engineering Lab, NITK Surathkal |
| 05/2018–07/2018: | Software Development Intern, Kindle Create, Publisher Tools to Reader, Amazon |
| 05/2017–07/2017: | Research Intern, Center for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, PES University |
| 08/2015–04/2019: | Undergraduate Student (Major: Information Technology, Specialization: Aritificial Intelligence), NITK Surathkal |
Misc.
- I really like chocolate-chip cookies, and hate yellow lays!
- I am scared (but also excited), a lot!, while teaching, publicly speaking, etc.
- Lecture notes on backpropagation (personal knowledge + compiled from various sources)
- Oh!, I love sleeping; when I'm not a computer scientist, I'm probably (read: definitely) asleep