Kanishk Sama
Every project here pairs what I built with how I proved it works.
Problem, architecture, verification, cost — one click away.
A football predictor that runs as a physical circuit instead of as code — two independently-trained models compiled straight into digital logic on a Basys 3, verified bit-exact from golden reference to physical board.
Sweeping LUT-only neural networks across 40+ Artix-7 implementations to find where accuracy stops paying for area, and validating the winning design on every sample in the dataset.
A tool that turns a trained Differentiable Weightless Neural Network into synthesizable Verilog, generates its test vectors and testbenches, and verifies the result — without a vendor toolchain.
Hand-optimized Rust and Arm NEON kernels for Mamba's selective scan, replacing PyTorch's sequential CPU fallback and validated against high-precision references at every layer from scalar code to the PyTorch integration.
A hardware Monte Carlo engine that plays 10,000 complete craps games in half a millisecond on a Basys 3, with results checked against the analytical win probability rather than against itself.
An arcade rhythm game built as a modular Verilog engine on a Basys 3 — a controller FSM and datapath handling scoring, timing, input, and display, with exact pause/resume semantics.
A two-stage optimizer over DREAMPlace that picks a placement strategy per design and then refines it with warm-started Bayesian search, cutting proxy cost 16% against a RePlace baseline across 21 benchmarks.
A C data-structures lab — an interactive tech-support diagnosis tool that starts from two solutions and permanently learns new ones, grafting new questions into a binary decision tree instead of hard-coding them.
A Geometry Dash clone built from scratch on an MSPM0G3507 microcontroller — real-time LCD sprite rendering and 12-bit DAC audio driven by two independent interrupt sources, with analog and digital input handled entirely in C++.
A resume-parsing tool that turns an uploaded PDF, DOCX, or TXT resume into structured JSON — local text extraction feeding a locally-run LLM instead of a brittle regex-and-templates approach or a cloud API.
A Tetris clone built in Java Swing to practice object-oriented game design — piece movement, collision, line clearing, and a live difficulty curve, built from scratch without a game engine.
A real-time, anonymous Q&A platform for live events — room codes, upvoting, and a host dashboard, synced across every device through Firestore with no backend of my own to run.
Built a Python dashboard analyzing 1,000+ human-agent cooperation trials, flagging ~40 low-quality sessions for review.
Developed a systems-engineering onboarding curriculum with technical resources and assessments for incoming members.
Automated GitLab CI/CD pipeline notifications to Slack and built Cypress integration tests for jobseeker onboarding. Won the company hackathon with a team-built AI interview-prep assistant.
I'm looking for internships in RTL design, design verification, and hardware acceleration. Email is the fastest way to reach me.
kanishk.sama@utexas.eduEligible to work in the U.S. with no restrictions