Sai Bangaru is a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA with eight years of experience bridging cutting-edge research and production systems in differentiable rendering, real-time path tracing, and neural rendering. He completed a PhD at MIT CSAIL under Fredo Durand and builds compiler-level support for differentiable programming—most notably adding forward-mode automatic differentiation and a differential type system to the shader compiler Slang. Sai’s work spans practical real-time graphics, physically based modeling, and perception applications, and he has a track record of shipping research prototypes into NVIDIA’s rendering stack following internships and research roles across industry and academia. Based in Cambridge, MA, he combines deep theoretical training with hands-on systems engineering, often tackling problems that require changes to compilers and IRs rather than only top-level models.
8 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
High School, High School at Maharishi International Residential School
Master's degree, Computer Science, Master's degree, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Contributions:141 reviews, 22 commits, 253 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Sai implemented core functionality related to forward-mode automatic differentiation within the shader compilation framework. Their work included adding syntax for marking functions for differentiation, developing a new type system, and adding support for various operations like vector arithmetic, control flow, and function calls. The contributions involved modifying the compiler's intermediate representation (IR) and introducing a differential type system to support the generation of derivative functions. The user significantly expanded the compiler's capabilities for auto-differentiation, enabling the handling of more complex shader code.
Contributions:12 commits, 3 pushes, 1 comment in 11 months
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