Bhattacharjee named the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science

Abhishek Bhattacharjee, a computer scientist whose research focuses on computer architectures and systems software, was recently appointed the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science, effective immediately. Bhattacharjee works on computer systems for high-performance servers in data centers and low-power embedded systems for brain-computer interfaces.

Bhattacharjee joined the faculty of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS), in the Department of Computer Science, in 2019, arriving from Rutgers University where he was an associate professor.

At Yale, he rapidly built up his research group and continued his groundbreaking work on efficient computer system memory management. Memory systems present the primary performance bottleneck in modern computer systems, and improving this bottleneck is central to the continued success of computational paradigms like artificial intelligence.

Bhattacharjee’s work improves modern memory systems through innovations to memory address translation — the critical process that maps a virtual location in software to a physical location in a computer. Memory address translation makes machines easy to program and enables machines to run multiple programs concurrently in a manner that is efficient and secure. For these reasons, memory address translation is ubiquitous in computer systems. A measure of the success of memory address translation is that it is so well integrated into modern hardware and software that practically all programmers rely on its existence without needing to know that it exists.

Bhattacharjee’s work has led the way in alerting the computing community that the ever-increasing data demands of modern software have made the performance overhead of memory translation problematic. In addition to identifying the problem, Bhattacharjee has proposed optimizations to reduce these overheads and accelerate modern systems. These optimizations have been directly integrated and influenced billions of commercial systems designed and shipped by AMD, NVIDIA, RISC-V, Meta, and the Linux community. For these “contributions to memory address translation used in widely available commercial microprocessors and operating systems,” Bhattacharjee was the recipient of the 2023 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, the computer architecture community’s highest recognition for a single intellectual contribution by a mid-career scientist.

More recently, Bhattacharjee has been working on building next-generation brain-computer interfaces. Brain-computer interfaces enable direct communication between biological neurons in the brain and computer systems. This allows brain-computer interfaces to convert the electrochemical signaling of biological neurons into the language used by computer systems and offers the potential to unlock greater understanding (and treatment of disease) in vision, hearing, speech, motor control, navigation, memory formation, and more. Bhattacharjee’s research goal is to augment brain-computer interfaces to deliver on this vision by, for the first time, supporting supercomputer-like performance on these devices. He is working with colleagues in computer science, electrical engineering, psychology, and the medical school to achieve this vision.

Beyond research, Bhattacharjee has revitalized teaching in the computer science department through his work in the core computer systems courses in the computer science curriculum, especially his signature course, CPSC 323 (Introduction to Systems Programming & Computer Organization). He has also mentored new lecturers in the department and chaired the curriculum committee. As curriculum committee chair, he has overseen the department’s process to restructure the entire core sequence to improve the educational experience of Yale CS students. He has supervised numerous undergraduate projects related to his research. He was recognized for his exemplary teaching and mentoring with the 2022 Yale SEAS Ackerman Award.

Bhattacharjee is also an active member of the Wu Tsai Institute (including serving on the steering committee and hiring committee), the Yale Center for Brain & Mind Health, the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, and as a fellow of Grace Hopper College. He has served as an active adviser for students in Philosophy, Math, and English and for many in Computer Science. He serves on PSETAC, the Yale Quantitative Reasoning Council, and has served on Yale’s Center for Research Computing steering committee.

Bhattacharjee earned his B.Eng degree from McGill University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University.