Emaan Heidari Homepage ©

• Emaan Heidari
• Systems & ML
• Bay Area, CA
• CE + CS @ USC
• eheidari@usc.edu
• github.com/emaanh
• linkedin.com/in/emaanheidari

About

I'm 20 and studying computer engineering + CS at USC. I build high-throughput + low-latency systems software.

I've worked on edge systems across drone autonomy, rocket engine data acquisition, and AI accelerator firmware, and I'm currently writing Rust systems software as a SWE intern at Tesla.

Some things I've built

Drag around this tetrahedron. Try to count the number of faces.

• Efficient Decode Attention: CUDA implementation of Flash-Decoding and paged KV-cache memory management.
• Representational Regularization for Diverse LLM Ensembles: improved LLM ensemble diversity and performance at negligible additional inference cost.
• FPGA neural inference accelerator: low-latency fixed-point arithmetic, LUT activations, and quantization-aware training.
• MurmurMatch: college social platform with 56k+ users, used by roughly 1/2 of Dartmouth and 1/3 of Stanford.
• ShuffleSpeak (JonesSpeak v4.2): data compression for physical, private communication with transformers + arithmetic coding
• Room Radar: IoT devices to detect human presence via radar.
• Empty Classroom Finder: find available classrooms on campus at USC.
• Neural Evolution: genetic algorithm implementation.
• BlitzVision v2 for BlitzGo: Maxwell and I created BlitzGo, a game whose simple rules give rise to profound strategic depth. BlitzVision explores what superhuman play looks like by training AI with self-play.
• Duel: rank anything with 1v1 duels.

Experience

• Tesla: systems software for the Powerwall 3 to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. (Rust, Go)
• USC Liquid Propulsion Lab: data acquisition and controls for a liquid bipropellant engine + feed system. (C++)
• SiFly: drone autonomy systems, simulation framework. (Python, C++)
• TandemLaunch: analog AI accelerator infra. (Python, C++)

Random

Things I like

Card/board games, roller coasters, non-Euclidean geometry, the ocean, fire, hiking, reading, and thinking.

still mostly accurate

Quotes I like

• "I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened." - Mark Twain
• "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton
• "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." - Emerson M. Pugh
• "Every man carries the whole form of the human condition within him." - Montaigne
• "The rules of go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play go." - Edward Lasker
• "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas Edison
• "What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard Feynman
• "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." - Richard Feynman
• "The details are not the details. They make the design." - Charles Eames
• "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." - Donald Knuth
• "Be so good they can't ignore you." - Steve Martin
• "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein
• "Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts." - Marcus Aurelius
• "We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom." - Montaigne
• "A candle never loses any of its light while lighting up another candle." - Rumi
• "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." - Albert Einstein
• "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people." - Isaac Newton
• "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." - John von Neumann
• "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
• "What was scattered gathers. What was gathered blows away." - Heraclitus
• "The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore." - Rumi
• "I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them." - Carl Friedrich Gauss
• "I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success." - Nikola Tesla