Viraj Thakkar

Projects

Things I have built and researched.

Systems Research

Current focus

Making storage systems faster, safer, and easier to operate.

Language Models as Systems Operators

Can an LLM tune a storage engine end to end, and where exactly does that capability stop?

  • HotStorage '24 — Best Paper
  • SYSTOR '26
  • ELMo-Tune · TellyTune

Key-Value Stores under Disaggregation

What breaks when an LSM engine's storage moves away from its compute, and can it stay fast, tunable, and encrypted once it does?

  • 3× SIGMOD
  • CaaS-LSM · SHIELD · O3-LSM
  • Encryption & offloading

Filesystems and Distributed Caches

How do you hold a globally distributed, client-side cache coherent, and what is the system underneath actually costing you?

  • CacheFS @ HPE Labs
  • FUSE · RDMA · eBPF
  • 2 patents under review

Applied Research

Research shaped by immediate needs in healthcare, child safety, and public policy.

Mapping Online Child Exploitation

  • Web crawling
  • Child safety
  • Policy

Crawls the dark web to measure online child abuse across India, for a submission to India's Parliament.

A Dashboard for Hospital Capacity

  • Healthcare
  • Forecasting

Pulls patient records, disease progression, and capacity into one view with hospital inventory forecasting.

Spotting Pandemic Phishing Pages

  • Security
  • Scam detection

Investigates a suspicious COVID-19 URL and returns a plain report on it before you decide to trust it.

Systems & Engineering

Things built to be used, not to be published.

CoView

  • Healthcare
  • Data visualization

A live dashboard of COVID-19 cases, outcomes, and records for KEM Hospital, reachable from any device.

Memories

  • Tooling
  • Image clustering

A small package that splits scanned album pages and restores their dates.

cgroup-monitor

  • Linux systems
  • Benchmarking
  • Tooling

Resource limits and measurements that live in the same script.

Earlier Work

Undergraduate projects and competition engineering, kept for the record.

Simulating Mobile Robots

  • Robotics
  • Simulation
  • Path planning

Simulation to find bad and unreliable paths before touching hardware.

Building a Robocon Robot

  • Robotics
  • Teamwork

Two years on a forty-person team building two robots every year.

From Investors to Startups

  • Full-stack web
  • Hackathon

Matches founders with investors by having both describe what they want in the same structured terms.

TorChat

  • Privacy
  • Anonymity networks

Privacy centered chatting application that utilizes the Tor Network to send and receive messages and data.

Ingredient Recommender

  • Machine learning
  • Recommender systems

ML-based engine that recommends ingredients to add to an existing recipe, for a new layer of flavor.