Rahul Atul Bhope
Hi I'm Rahul from India. I'm a PhD Candidate in Computer Science (Networked Systems) at the University of California, Irvine. I also go by the alias supLagger. My research interests include LLM Prompt Optimization, Federated Learning, Smart Healthcare & IoT. My hobbies include reading novels, listening to music, singing and playing the guitar once in a while. I love to read the literary fiction genre. My musical interests include Bollywood, Indian classical and Western Pop music. I enjoy cycling and playing cricket.
Education
- PhD Candidate in Computer Science (Networked Systems) University of California, Irvine – 2021 - Present
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Majors: Computer Science, Networking and Telecommunications
Advisor: Dr. Nalini Venkatasubramanian
Teaching: TA for the courses Operating Systems (grad and undergrad), Distributed Systems (grad), Critical Writing (undergrad)
Research interests
Core: LLM Prompt Optimization, Federated Learning, Smart Healthcare & IoT
Applications: Foundation Models, Healthcare Systems, and Edge Computing
- Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Instrumentation and Control Engineering, NIT, Tiruchirappalli – 2016 - 2020
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Majors: Instrumentation and Control Engineering
Minors: Computer Science and Engineering
Research Papers
Shift Happens: Mixture of Experts based Continual Adaptation in Federated Learning Under Review - ACM Middleware 2025
Rahul Atul Bhope, K. R. Jayaram, Praveen Venkateswaran, Nalini Venkatasubramanian
OptiSeq: Ordering Examples On-The-Fly for In-Context Learning Accepted to EMNLP 2025 Findings
Rahul Atul Bhope, Praveen Venkateswaran, K. R. Jayaram, Vatche Isahagian, Vinod Muthusamy, Nalini Venkatasubramanian
DIM-SUM: Dynamic Imputation Methods for Smart Utility Management PVLDB 2025
Ryan Hildebrant, Rahul Atul Bhope, Sharad Mehrotra, Christopher Tull, Nalini Venkatasubramanian
FLIPS: Federated Learning using Intelligent Participant Selection ACM Middleware 2023
Rahul Atul Bhope, K. R. Jayaram, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, Ashish Verma, Gegi Thomas
Testing CareDEX: SAGAT methodology deployed for a disaster drill at a senior living community Issues in Information Systems. 2023, Vol. 24 Issue 1, p1-15. 15p
Allred, Aaron; Arauz, Alfonso; Bazargani, Mowhebat; Bhope, Rahul; Boomershine, Erin; Campbell, Nnenia; Davison, Christopher B.; Dutt, Nikil; Eguchi, Ronald; Gibbs, Lisa; ZhengHui Hu; Kenne, Modeste; Mehrotra, Sharad; Park, Davis; Penney, Celeste; Rousseau, Julie; Venkatasubramanian, Nalini; Guoxi Wang
Don't Miss the Train: A Case for Systems Research into Training on the Edge 2022 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)
Prashanthi S. K, Aakash Khochare, Sai Anuroop Kesanapalli, Rahul Bhope, Yogesh Simmhan
GoCoronaGo: Privacy Respecting Contact Tracing for COVID-19 Management Journal of the Indian Institute of Science 2020 (100th Edition)
Yogesh Simmhan, Tarun Rambha, Aakash Khochare, Shriram Ramesh, Animesh Baranawal, John Varghese George, Rahul Atul Bhope, Amrita Namtirtha, Amritha Sundararajan, Sharath Suresh Bhargav, Nihar Thakkar & Raj Kiran
Patents
Federated Learning Participant Selection Through Label Distribution Clustering P202300541US01 - Filed Patent
Optimizing In-Context Example Ordering for API Sequence Generation using LLMs P202402468US01 - Filed Patent
Experience
Research Scientist Intern - Summer 2025
- Developing task-aware multimodal memory systems for efficient storage and retrieval.
- Implementing hierarchical storage and captioning policies optimizing storage, performance and latency for agentic memory systems.
Research Scientist Intern - Summer 2024
- Evaluated LLMs for tool, API, and sequence predictions, analyzing prompt variations and recommending best practices for effective prompting.
- Developed a method to optimize the order of in-context examples in prompts, improving accuracy by 5.5 - 10.5% points through a novel scoring system based on log probabilities.
Research Scientist Intern - Summer 2022
- Worked on improving Federated Learning using Private Clustering to solve class imbalance and scalability issues.
- Reduced the communication costs in FL by 20-60% and improved accuracy by 17-20%.
Project Associate (2020 - 2021)
- Benchmarked Federated Learning on a cluster of heterogeneous Nvidia Jetson devices, evaluating optimizations like compression and storage.
- Managed networking and user behavior analytics for the GoCoronaGo contact tracing app, piloted at four campuses in India.
- Enhanced BLE RSSI-based distance inference, improving proximity estimation accuracy by 20% over Google Exposure Notifications.
Research Intern (Summer 2019)
- Worked under Professor Lam Siew Kei at the Hardware and Embedded Systems Lab (HESL).
- Developed Campus Nav NTU, a navigation system for indoor and semi-indoor environments, using WiFi fingerprinting, IMU and Forward Algorithm for accurate tracking.
- Achieved 80% localization accuracy and 67% accuracy in Activity Recognition using IMU Sensor Data.
Research Intern (December 2018)
- Worked under Professor Sudip Misra at the Smart Wireless Applications & Networking (SWAN) Lab.
- Developed Digiskope, a real-time heart sound visualization system using Python and Android, and an Android app for the Sensor Drop Networks (SDN) healthcare project.
Leadership Experience
Teaching Assistant (2021 - Present)
- CS 143A: Principles of Operating Systems, CS 143B: Projects in Operating Systems
- CS 237P: Graduate Operating Systems, CS 230: Graduate Distributed Systems
IoT-SITY REU Mentor (Summer 2023)
- Guided the development of a decision support system for senior care using Bio-Clinical BERT trained on nurses' notes as part of IoT-SITY, a program focused on IoT research for smart and connected communities.
Capstone Project Mentor (Spring 2023)
- Mentored professional master (MCS) students in developing a hybrid cloud platform for secure data sharing, storage, and private record linkage.
Head - Applications Development (May 2017 - May 2020)
- Led a team of 20 developers to create solutions for campus development projects and start-ups in India.
- Spearheaded the development of SportsFete'19, the Android App for the inter departmental sports fest of NIT Tiruchirappalli and Orientation'19 an app based guide for the freshman students at NIT Tiruchirappalli.
- Conducted 5 workshops on Android App Development and Internet of Things (IoT) for Juniors and students of colleges in India. Mentored about 500+ students till date.
Personal
Travel & Adventures
- In 2023, I traveled across Italy — starting in Venice and ending in Amalfi.
- In the summer of 2025, a few friends and I walked the length of Manhattan — from its northernmost point down to Battery Park.
