Saman Amarasinghe

Professor Saman Amarasinghe is a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he leads the Commit compiler research group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research focuses on programming languages and compilers that maximize application performance on modern computing platforms, with a particular emphasis on high-performance domain-specific languages.

Professor Amarasinghe received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Cornell University in 1988, followed by master's and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1990 and 1997, respectively. He joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1997 and has since become a world leader in his field.

Professor Amarasinghe's research interests span programming languages, compiler design, and high-performance computing, with a particular focus on domain-specific languages. His group has developed numerous influential languages and compilers including Halide, TACO, Simit, StreamIt, StreamJIT, PetaBricks, MILK, Cimple, and GraphIt, which deliver unprecedented performance for application domains such as image processing, stream computations, and graph analytics. He has also pioneered the application of machine learning for compiler optimizations, from Meta optimization in 2003 to the OpenTuner autotuner framework.

Professor Amarasinghe's publication history reveals a consistent research trajectory toward creating specialized language and compiler solutions that address performance challenges in specific domains while hiding complexity from application developers. His recent work focuses heavily on sparse computing, tensor algebra, graph processing, and the integration of machine learning techniques into compiler technology, demonstrating his ability to identify and address emerging computational challenges.

• ACM Fellow (2019)

As an educator, Professor Amarasinghe has developed the popular Performance Engineering of Software Systems (6.172) class with Professor Charles Leiserson and created innovative project-based courses including the Open Source Software Project Lab, the Open Source Entrepreneurship Lab, and the Bring Your Own Software Project Lab. He also serves as the faculty director of MIT Global Startup Labs, which has helped create more than 20 startups across 17 countries. His research has translated into practical applications through startups like Determina, Inc. (acquired by VMware), demonstrating the real-world impact of his academic work.

Professor Amarasinghe co-led the Raw architecture project with Professor Anant Agarwal, which did pioneering work on scalable multicores. His entrepreneurial activities include founding Determina, Inc. based on computer security research from his MIT lab and co-founding Lanka Internet Services, Ltd., the first Internet Service Provider in Sri Lanka, showcasing his ability to bridge academic research with commercial applications.