Chirag C. Shetty
PhD Student (Computer Science) · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Hello, I'm Chirag C. Shetty or simply Chitty if you can't roll the 'r' 😛.
I am an Engineer. I love to build stuff, while trying to get the big picture. Robert Noyce and David Packard — both brilliant engineers and visionary business leaders — are my role models among many others. As a researcher, I greatly admire Claude Shannon (he quantified something as abstract as 'information'!).
I graduated from IIT Bombay in 2017 with Dual Degrees (Bachelors & Masters) in Electrical Engineering with specialization in Communication Systems & Signal Processing. Enroute, I worked on Neuromorphic Computing, Information Theory, GPS/IRNSS Receiver Design and learned a bit of finance jargon at Deutsche Bank. Very grateful to have met many kind, smart and highly motivated friends and mentors during my time at IIT Bombay.
Later, wanting to explore semiconductor design, I worked at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in Hsinchu, Taiwan and then at Texas Instruments (TI) in Bangalore, India. TI was awesome! I joined a team designing novel high speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and got to work on the full pipeline from concept to tapeout.
In 2020, I started PhD at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), first in ECE. But thanks to COVID-19, I zoom-scrolled into a course on Distributed Systems taught by my now advisor, Prof. Indranil Gupta. With deep concepts and broad applications, Distributed Systems is exciting. So, I changed to CS PhD and that's where I'm at :)
Along the way, won a few awards and did some fun stuff which I boast about here.
Photo credit: Vasilis Livanos
Publications & Patents
Publications
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Cloud Systems / Resource ManagementACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) 2025
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Systems for ML
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Communication SystemsACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) 2020
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Information TheoryIEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2019, Paris
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Signal Processing & AnalogMaster's Thesis 2017, IIT Bombay
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Bio-inspired ComputingIEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2015, Lisbon, Portugal
Patents — Texas Instruments, 2018–19
- Lookup Table for Non-Linear Systems (Mar 2025)
- Calibration Scheme for Filling Lookup Table in an ADC (Jan 2024)
- Gain Mismatch Correction for Voltage-to-Delay Preamplifier Array (Sep 2022)
- Lookup-Table-Based Analog-to-Digital Converter (Apr 2022)
- Conversion and Folding Circuit for Delay-Based Analog-to-Digital Converter System (Aug 2020)
- Delay-Based Residue Stage (Aug 2020)
Research
Distributed Systems & Systems for ML — UIUC
My current focus is Autoscaling in Cloud and ML systems. I joined in Jan 2020 with the ECE Distinguished Research Fellowship. At UIUC, I am exploring topics in Distributed Systems and Systems for ML advised by Prof. Indranil Gupta. Earlier in 2020, I contributed to a work in communication systems, published at MobiCom [link].
Indian Regional Navigation System (IRNSS) Receiver Design — IIT Bombay
When India completed the 7 satellite IRNSS in April 2016, I decided to build a receiver. I did it as my Master's Thesis with Prof. Madhav Desai and Prof. Sibiraj Pillai, and built this. IRNSS is a navigation system like the GPS (owned by the USA), except just for the Indian Subcontinent. Engineering behind GPS is quite mind-blowing. By studying GPS, we built a similar receiver stack for IRNSS. We built an end-to-end system complete with an analog front end and demonstrated by calculating ranges to the satellites. This work won the Undergraduate Research Award (URA03).
Information Theory — IIT Bombay
Wireless communication seems magical. I was lucky to find a mentor in Prof. Sibiraj Pillai who introduced me to a wide variety of concepts in the field and in particular to Information Theory. We started to work on obtaining close bounds for capacity of decentralized MIMO MAC Channel in 2017. It finally culminated in this first-author work published at ISIT 2019, Paris. [link]
Bio-Inspired Computing — IIT Bombay
At IIT Bombay I was fortunate to work with Prof. Bipin Rajendran, and be introduced to the intriguing world of bio-computing. We built this charming bot that is controlled by 10 microcontroller neurons. This first-author work was demonstrated at ISCAS 2015, Lisbon [link]. I believe extracting the working principles of biological computing, just like we extracted the working principles of flight a century ago, will be a defining problem of this century (I picked the analogy from Prof. Rajendran). Find some pictures and video here.