Ash Vardanian
Founder, Benevolent Dictator For Life
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAsh Vardanian is a founder and long-time engineer who has spent 11+ years building high-performance search and retrieval systems across modalities—from multilingual text and code to images, chemical compounds, and biopolymers—while running Unum from London and San Francisco. He combines systems-level performance engineering (notably AVX2/AVX-512 and ARM Neon optimizations in his StringZilla work) with product and investment experience as a venture partner and managing partner for late-stage deep-tech deals. Comfortable both shipping code and setting strategy, he has a history of early app success, teaching data science, and mentoring AI research through programs like the Wolfram Summer School. Pragmatic, polyglot, and hardware-aware, he turns “outrageous amounts of coffee” into compact, assembly-accelerated solutions that squeeze real-world speed from CPUs and accelerators.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Machine Learning Research, Machine Learning Research at Wolfram Summer SchoolComputational Linguistics, Computational Linguistics at Sofia University St. Kliment OhridskiBachelor's degree Incomplete Astrophysics, Bachelor's degree Incomplete Astrophysics at Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic UniversityArtificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence at Charles University
Russian, English, German, Armenian, Spanish
Stackoverflow
434reputation
70kreached
9answers
21questions
Github Skills (19)
benchmark10
c-language10
strings10
text-manipulation10
benchmarking10
string-algorithms10
performance-optimization10
cprogramming-language10
assembler8
assembly8
rocksdb6
multithreading6
algorithm6
redis6
uiviewcontroller6
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
ashvardanian/StringZilla
Aug 2020 - Jan 2023
Up to 10x faster strings for C, C++, Python, Rust, and Swift, leveraging NEON, AVX2, AVX-512, and SWAR to accelerate search, sort, edit distances, alignment scores, etc 🦖
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer / Performance EngineerContributions:71 releases, 51 reviews, 40 commits in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ash's contributions primarily focus on optimizing string manipulation algorithms, specifically for C++ implementations. They developed three distinct C++ implementations for substring search, including a naive approach, one inspired by Rabin-Karp, and an AVX2 instruction set-based version. The user benchmarked the performance of these implementations, highlighting significant speed improvements. They also added optional AVX-512 and ARM Neon implementations and provided additional benchmarks, demonstrating a focus on performance and hardware-level optimization for string operations.
beautifulsoupcommon-crawlcsvdatasetinformation-retrieval
ashvardanian/www.ashvardanian.com
Nov 2019 - Mar 2023
Contributions:93 pushes, 2 branches, 2 issues in 3 years 5 months
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