Sai Achalla

Hello! I'm a first-year PhD student at UCLA, advised by Sam Kumar and Remy Wang.

I'm broadly interested in building efficient, large scale systems.

I studied computer science during my undergrad at UC Berkeley. I was involved with the SkyLab where I was fortunate to work with Conor Power and Prof. Joe Hellerstein. I'm extremely grateful for their advice in every aspect of my academic journey.

Fun Fact: I'm from Francistown, Botswana. If you know where that is, your geography knowledge is pretty impressive!

Email  /  Scholar  /  X  /  Github

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Research

NaSh: Guardrails for an LLM-Powered Natural Language Shell
Bimal Raj Gyawali, Saikrishna Achalla, Konstantinos Kallas, Sam Kumar
[paper]

We explore how a shell that uses an LLM to accept natural language input might be designed differently from the shells of today.

Wrapping Rings in Lattices: An Algebraic Symbiosis of Incremental View Maintenance and Eventual Consistency
Conor Power, Saikrishna Achalla, Ryan Cottone, Nathaniel Macasaet, Joseph M. Hellerstein
PaPoC, 2024  
[paper]

We reconcile the use of semi-lattices in CRDTs and the use of groups and rings in incremental view maintenance to construct systems with strong eventual consistency, incremental computation, and database query optimization.

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, CS161 Summer 2023
Teaching Assistant, CS161 Fall 2023
Head Teaching Assistant, CS161 Spring 2024

Work Experience

Research Intern
Summer 2025
Mentor: Will Schultz
Researched transactions and alternative definitions of snapshot isolation.

Template adapted from Jonathan Barron.