ArshiA Akhavan

ArshiA Akhavan

M.S. Student in Computer Science

San Diego State University

Biography

I am an M.S. student in Computer Science at San Diego State University, where I work as a research assistant with Bryan Donyanavard. I am applying to PhD programs for Fall 2027.

My research interests are in programming languages and verification for concurrent and distributed systems. I want to make deadlocks, data races, memory-ordering and consistency bugs unrepresentable, rather than finding them after the fact. I am also interested in type systems, verified program rewriting with e-graphs, and safe systems programming in Rust.

At SDSU I built Yggdrasil, a 3D scene graph for robots written in Rust that answers queries up to 121× faster than a published baseline. I am now extending it to multi-agent settings, where a global server resolves the logical and semantic conflicts between the agents’ views of the world. I also collaborate with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on AEBench, a benchmark of AI agents on artifact evaluation. Before SDSU, I was a graduate researcher at Bowling Green State University, where I built LinkAnchor (FSE ‘26), an LLM agent for issue-to-commit link recovery.

I have industry experience as a Software Engineer at Sotoon, a cloud service provider, and as a Data Platform Engineer at Digikala, the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East.

I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology.

Download my academic resumé.
Download my industrial resumé.

Interests
  • Programming Languages
  • Formal Verification
  • Concurrent and Distributed Systems
  • Type Systems
  • E-graphs and Equality Saturation
  • Safe Systems Programming (Rust)
Education
  • M.S. in Computer Science, Fall 2025 - present

    San Diego State University

  • B.Sc. in Computer Engineering, Fall 2018 - July 2024

    Sharif University of Technology

Research Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Graduate Research Assistant
Sep 2025 – Present San Diego, CA

Advisor: Bryan Donyanavard

  • Building Yggdrasil, a 3D scene graph for robots, written in Rust and designed for both construction and querying. Its layers form a DAG rather than a stack, and it answers pattern-matching, nearest-neighbor, field-of-view and traversal queries in place, using per-layer and per-node spatial indexes it keeps current as the graph changes.
  • Every measured query takes 2–127 µs, up to 121× faster than a published C++ baseline. Yggdrasil is integrated into three published robotics pipelines and removes up to 99% of the time they spend on their scene graph operations.
  • Currently extending Yggdrasil to multi-agent settings where each agent contributes its own view of the world, and a global server resolves the logical and semantic conflicts between them.
  • Fully funded by NSF award CNS-2348349.
 
 
 
 
 
Research Collaborator (AEBench)
Jun 2026 – Present Remote

With Bogdan Alexandru Stoica

  • AEBench measures how effective AI agents are in reproducing the results of published systems artifacts, and proposes a systematic framework for evaluation and execution of AI agents on artifact evaluation.
  • The goal is to provide Artifact Evaluation Committees with a tool to fully automate the evaluation process via use of AI agents.
 
 
 
 
 
Bowling Green State University
Graduate Researcher (LLM Agents for Software Engineering)
Jan 2025 – Sep 2025 Bowling Green, OH

Advisor: Abbas Heydarnoori

  • Built LinkAnchor, an autonomous agent that recovers links between issues and the commits that fix them (FSE ‘26, first author).
  • LIA: supervised fine-tuning of LLMs for automatic issue assignment.
  • Bug triaging with instruction-tuned LLMs.

Publications

(2026). Yggdrasil: a Layer-First 3D Scene Graph for Real-Time Querying. arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.38640.

PDF Code DOI

(2026). LinkAnchor: An Autonomous LLM-Based Agent for Issue-to-Commit Link Recovery. Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering, Vol. 3, Issue FSE (FSE 2026, Montreal, Canada).

PDF Code DOI

(2026). LIA: Supervised Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models for Automatic Issue Assignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.01780.

PDF DOI

(2025). Automated Bug Triaging using Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.21156.

PDF DOI

Honors and Awards

 
 
 
 
 
Presidential Graduate Research Fellowship (PGRF)
Sep 2025 – Dec 2027 San Diego, CA
  • University merit fellowship awarded by SDSU for excellence in research and academic achievement, in addition to my NSF-funded research assistantship.
 
 
 
 
 
Ranked 118th
Konkur
Jun 2018
  • Ranked 118th in the National University Entrance Exam on Mathematics (Konkour) among more than 144,000 students nationwide. (Top 0.08%)
 
 
 
 
 
BGSU ACM
2nd place, BGSU ACM Hackathon
BGSU ACM
Apr 2025 USA, Ohio
  • Awarded for creating Piqniq, an emergency alert app designed to support users through panic attacks.

Teaching

Sharif University of Technology, Teaching Assistant and Head TA, 2019 – 2023

  • Operating Systems (Dr. Mehdi Kharrazi): Head TA, TA
  • Multi-Core Computing (Dr. Hajar Falahati, Prof. Hamid Sarbazi-Azad): Head TA, TA
  • Fundamentals of Programming in C (Dr. Mohammad Amin Fazli, Mr. Reza Fakouri, Dr. Shirin Baghoolizadeh): Head TA, TA
  • Advanced Programming in Java (Dr. Mohammad Amin Fazli, Dr. Mahdi Mostafazadeh, Mr. Iman Isazadeh, Mr. Amir Malekzadeh, Mr. Ali Chekah): Head TA, TA
  • Computer Networks (Dr. Mahdi Jafari Siavoshani): Head TA of the course project, TA
  • Compiler Design (Mr. Mohammad Reza Bahrami): TA
  • Automata Theory (Dr. Ali Movaghar): TA
  • Computer Structure and Language (Dr. Laleh Arshadi): TA
  • System Analysis and Design (Mr. Alireza Agha Mohamadi): Head TA of the course project
  • Big Data (Dr. Sharareh Alipour): Head TA of the course project
  • Database Design (Mr. Mojtaba Varmazyar): TA
  • Numerical Computation (Prof. Hamid Sarbazi-Azad, Dr. Samira Hossein Ghorban): TA

Quera, Course Design, 2022

Service & Outreach

 
 
 
 
 
Artifact Evaluation Committee Member
USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC ‘26)
2026
 
 
 
 
 
Code o She'r (1st edition)
Founder & President
Code o She’r (1st edition)
2023 – 2024 Tehran
  • Code o She’r is a Spaghetti Code Challenge that focuses on undefined behavior and exploits architectural behaviors of computers and compilers with the aim of hosting an environment for contestants to become more familiar with the field of computer systems.

  • As the Founder and President of Code o She’r, I took on the role of leadership over a team of 70+ members and oversaw various flows from design, marketing, and executive duties to scientific and technical tasks.
 
 
 
 
 
SSC
Vice President of Technology
SSC
2020 – 2021 Tehran
  • Students’ Scientific Chapter (SSC) is a scientific association consisting of all students of Computer Engineering Department of Sharif University of Technology. It holds scientific talks and events throughout the year. Its central council consists of nine members, selected by votes of all students.

  • I was elected vice president of technology of the SSC for one academic year, after receiving the most votes in the general election and then the votes of the other central council members.
 
 
 
 
 
ICPC Asia Tehran Regional Contest 2023
Chief of Technical Staff
ICPC Asia Tehran Regional Contest 2023
2024 Tehran
  • The ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest, known as the ICPC, is an annual multi-tiered competitive programming competition among the universities of the world.

  • As Chief of Technical Staff, I led a technical team of 10 members and addressed a variety of technical needs, such as:

    • Build contest-customized OS images and distribute them on contestants’ hosts using PXE Network boot.
    • Manage and configure hosts used by contestants and monitor their connectivity.
    • Restrict external access and host to host access of each contestant’s host device.
    • Ensure network performance and fairness between different devices used by the contestants.
 
 
 
 
 
ICPC Asia Tehran Regional Contest 2022
Chief of Technical Staff
ICPC Asia Tehran Regional Contest 2022
2023 Tehran
 
 
 
 
 
ACM-ICPC Asia Tehran Regional Contest 2019
Chief of Technical Staff
ACM-ICPC Asia Tehran Regional Contest 2019
2019 Tehran
 
 
 
 
 
The 2019 ICPC Asia-West Continent Final Contest (Tehran Site)
Chief of Technical Staff
The 2019 ICPC Asia-West Continent Final Contest (Tehran Site)
2020 Tehran
 
 
 
 
 
Sharif AI Challenge 2021
Chief of Infrastructure and System Team
Sharif AI Challenge 2021
2020 – 2021 Tehran
  • AIC is the biggest AI contest in the country, in which teams develop AI strategies to compete against other teams.

  • As the Chief of Infrastructure and System Team, I was tasked with leading a team of 4 to address the Infrastructure needs of the contest:

    • Develop an event-driven matching system.
    • Design and Develop an auto-scaler system for the matching infrastructure to ensure minimum latency for the matches.
    • Ensure fair resource allocation between rival binaries.
    • Create an isolated sand-box for each contestant binary and eliminate any side-channel attack that may affect the fairness of the results.
    • Maintain data storage for everything from game logs to contestant binaries and monitoring data.

Projects

*

Industrial Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Sotoon
Software Engineer
Jan 2023 – Dec 2024 Tehran

Sotoon is a B2B cloud provider that focuses on reliable and scalable computing solutions. I worked in the K8s-as-a-Service team, designing and maintaining Sotoon’s Kubernetes engine and several integrations to Sotoon’s services, such as CSI, CNI, and Auto-scaler.
Key Achievements:

  • Automated management of 90+ Kubernetes clusters, optimizing operational efficiency and reducing tickets by 30%.
  • Achieved a 40% reduction in initial cluster costs by eliminating duplicated system components and introducing multi-tenancy.
  • Redesigned cluster network topology to enhance security and abstract control plane management from customers.
  • Planned and led the migration of over 100 customers’ k8s-clusters to the new infrastructure with zero downtime.
  • Implemented an A/B testing framework for cluster updates, preventing 5 otherwise catastrophic failures.
  • Investigated and debugged a critical data race issue in the CSI plug-in that could have resulted in the deletion of over 70TB of client storage data, ensuring data integrity and service reliability.
  • Automated the CI/CD pipeline for OS image creation, reducing new k8s version release time from 1 week to 1 day.
 
 
 
 
 
Digikala
Data Platform Engineer
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 Tehran

Digikala is the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East, serving over 40 million users. As part of the Big Data & AI team, I was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure required to efficiently store, process, and manage the vast amounts of data generated by user activity.
Key Achievements:

  • Developed a Parallel Data Query Engine on top of Apache Spark, revising data retrieval models and queries to reduce resource usage by 23% and computation time by 43%.
  • Reduced API latency by identifying blocking operations in an asynchronous workflow, optimizing the critical path to triple requests per second (RPS).
  • Designed and maintained a data platform using K8s for orchestration, Ceph for storage, Airflow for scheduling, Spark for batch/stream processing, and Kafka with Debezium for database synchronization.
  • Implemented GitOps-based infrastructure management with ArgoCD, automating API deployments via Kustomize and Helm, reducing release cycles from 6 months to 6 hours.
  • Deployed and maintained a staging environment and built a framework for the Data Science team, reducing their development time significantly.
 
 
 
 
 
Tapsell
DevOps Engineer
Jan 2020 – Mar 2021 Tehran

Tapsell is a leading AdTech company in the Middle East. As part of the DevOps team, I provided cloud infrastructure and platform services that enabled other technical teams to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently.
Key Achievements:

  • Optimized Cassandra’s disk usage for different workloads, resulting in a 90% reduction in disk usage for some of our clusters.
  • Designed and implemented a fully automated backup, validation, and restore system for our cloud-native infrastructure, replacing the legacy solution while preserving backward compatibility to enable seamless, incremental migration of 30TB+ of data with zero downtime.
  • Built and maintained infrastructure by deploying a staging cluster on K8s, developing CI/CD pipelines with GitLab CI, automating provisioning with Terraform on VMWare, and administering Linux-based VMs to resolve network bottlenecks and improve performance.

Languages

Rust
Rust
C
C
Cpp
C++
OCaml
OCaml
go
Go
python
Python
bash
Bash
verilog
Verilog
latex
LaTeX

Tools and Technologies

k8s
Kubernetes
docker
Docker
wasm
WebAssembly
aws
AWS
azure
Azure
do
Digital Ocean
cuda
Nvidia CUDA
intel
Intel AVX
qemu
Qemu
packer
Packer
mongodb
MongoDB
cassandra
Cassandra
elasticsearch
Elasticsearch
kafka
Kafka
redis
Redis
ansible
Ansible
terraform
Terraform
helm
Helm
argocd
ArgoCD
spark
Spark
hdfs
HDFS
ceph
CEPH
raspberry
Raspberry Pi
arduino
Arduino