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General Information

Full Name Nickvash Kani
Date of Birth October 21st 1988
Languages English, Farsi

Education

  • 2017
    PhD - Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Georgia Institute of Technology
  • 2013
    MS - Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Georgia Institute of Technology
  • 2010
    BS - Computer Engineering
    Boston University

Experience

  • 2019 - Present
    Research Assistant Professor
    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    • Currently an assistant research professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research is focused on specialized algorithms for the retrieval and manipulation of mathematical expressions. I also teach a junior-level undergraduate algorithms course in the department.
  • 2018-2019
    Senior Software Engineer
    Reservoir Labs
    • The company was contracted to develop a LLVM-based C-compiler for a single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) processor. Furthermore, I have and continue to develop an operating environment (OE). Similar to OpenCL or CUDA, the operating environment handles kernel- scheduling/execution/synchronization and device memory allocation.
  • 2011 - 2017
    Graduate Research Assistant
    Georgia Institute of Technology
    • Design and evaluation of spin-based logical devices - The goal of this research was to theoretically model and analyze various spin-dependent effects, including spin-transfer torque, dipolar-coupling, and thermally induced stochasticity, in ferromagnetic thin films.
    • Physical Design of Network-on-Chip Architectures - We investigated the physical cost associated with NoC interconnection fabric and developed design solutions to mitigate the overhead and achieve the best-case performance at advanced CMOS technology nodes.
  • 2013
    IC Design Intern
    Broadcom Corporation
    • Developed script that automatically ran necessary programs to layout and formally verify chip designs. Performed power-threaded analysis on compiled designs and verified operation of scripted design.
  • 2007 - 2008
    FInancial Systems Managmeent Intern
    Save the Children
    • Maintained existing accounting infrastructure and synced distributed air-gapped financial database system. Designed new database system for rapid reporting of financial metrics. Assisted in research and acquisition of alternate financial software.

Honors and Awards

  • 2022
    • 1st Place - Task 2 - NL4Opt Challenge - NIPS 2022
  • 2018
    • Cover of AIP - Journal of Applied Physics July 2018 Issue.
  • 2016
    • Cover of “IEEE Transactions on Magnetics” Feb 2016 Issue.
  • 2014
    • Best Poster at SRC-INDEX Annual Review, 2014.
  • 2010
    • P. T. Hsu Memorial Award for Outstanding Senior Design Project, Boston University, 2010.
    • Graduated Magna Cum Laude from Boston University

Academic Interests

  • Mathematcial Language Processing
    • Novel embedding schemes for mathematical texts with a focus on modern machine-learning techniques applied to a novel context.
    • Knowledge maps linking technical manuscripts through their
  • Formal Verification Techniques
    • Term-rewriting systems that can aid in the creation of corpora to train machine-learning models.
    • Novel data structures to extract mathematical semantics aiding analytic theorem proving methods.