I am a PhD student in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, advised by Prof. Aditya Akella. I work on systems research with a focus on how to apply ML to systems problems. I am involved with the LDOS venture.

I previously completed my Master's degree in Computer Science & Engineering at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I worked with Profs Ryan Huang and Mosharaf Chowdhury on fault tolerance and AI resource management. I was recognized with the Moeller Award for outstanding academic achievements and social responsibility.

I was also an intern at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems(MPI-SWS) during Summer 2025, where I worked with Profs Reto Achermann and Andrea Lattuada on x86 hardware modeling for paging.

Previously, I worked as a Research Engineer at the National University of Singapore in the ECE department under Prof Mohan Guruswamy on anomaly detection in Software Defined Networking. I also have industry experience as a Software Engineer at Google and a Quantitative Research Intern at JP Morgan Chase & Co.

I graduated with a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2022. For more details, check my projects, CV, or reach out via email.

News

Started my PhD in Computer Science at UT Austin, advised by Prof. Aditya Akella Aug 2026
Received a student scholarship to travel to SOSP'26 Jul 2026
LiteLib: Containing Failure Impact for Stateful Applications with Compact Replicas accepted to appear at NSDI'27 Jun 2026
Towards Tractable Hardware Model Validation Against Real Hardware to appear at PLOS'26 Jun 2026
Dual-Branch Transformer for Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection to appear at IEEE CNS'25 Sep 2025
Interning at MPI-SWS with Profs Andrea Lattuada and Reto Achermann May 2025
Received the Moeller Award at the University of Michigan Feb 2025

Publications

Towards Tractable Hardware Model Validation Against Real Hardware
Rishika Varma Kalidindi, Reto Achermann
PLOS'26 | Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems
pdf | cite

Dual-Branch Transformer for Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection from Multivariate KPIs in the 5G User Plane
Zixu Tian, Rishika Varma Kalidindi, Mohan Gurusamy
CNS'25 | IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security
pdf | cite

UT Austin
2026 - Present
University of Michigan
2024 - 2026
NUS
2023 - 2024
Google
2022 - 2023
JP Morgan Chase
2021
IIT Madras
2018 - 2022