Deepraj Pandey

Research & Development

These days, I'm building Burst, background compute for developers. It runs long jobs in isolated cloud machines, with no infrastructure to set up or manage.

Burst came out of a problem I kept running into: testing an idea shouldn't begin with a day of infrastructure setup. You push a long-running job from your machine, it runs in an isolated cloud VM, and you get results back, with nothing to provision or maintain.

Most of my time goes to the systems that make that fast and safe: virtual-machine isolation, a warm pool for quick starts, hardened networking, and usage-based billing. We're working with early design partners running real workloads in ML research, drug discovery, and quantitative finance.

Before Burst, I co-founded and ran a research and fabrication lab at Ashoka University for four years.

Microscopy Automation

Collaboration with Dr. Meghna Agarwala • Oxford Schmidt AI in Science

Building modular, low-cost microscopy systems for pollen image analysis in palynology research. Our current work includes automated slide agitation mechanisms and focus-stacking systems for standard observation microscopes. The goal is an open source platform that makes this automation accessible to ecology and environmental science labs with limited resources.

Developing this work with Ananya Dinkar. Accepted as a technical workshop at INQUA 2027.

Renewable-Cloud Computing

Microsoft Research India • 2021-2022

Surveyed and helped scope research on running datacenters on renewable energy by flexing compute to match a variable solar and wind supply.

Publications

Balancing act: persistence of the red fox in the dog-dominated landscapes of the Trans-Himalaya

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2025

Cellular Automata Workshop

Education p5.js

Workshop introducing 160 high school students to computational thinking through Conway's Game of Life. Built the simulator and co-taught with Yesirat Sanni.

Ashoka Young Scholars Programme, Summer 2025.

The Indian Car Attack

Security RF Hardware

Tested replay and roll jam attacks on Suzuki Swift Dzire's keyless entry system using RTL-SDR and YARD Stick One.

Found the 2020 model uses KeeLoq encryption broken since 2008. CPS Security, Spring 2021.

AGON

Parsing Binary TypeScript

Built a binary data interchange format that's 70% faster at encoding and produces 71% smaller files than JSON.

Designed a CFG-based spec with custom encoder/decoder. Theory of Computation, Spring 2021.

CovidBloc

Blockchain Privacy

Private blockchain powered contact tracing framework based on the Apple-Google Notification System Cryptographic Framework.

Developed during the pandemic to explore privacy-preserving contact tracing.

View code

HackDAV

Hackathon Education

Founded one of the country's first high school hackathons in my junior year at high school.

Pioneered grassroots tech education initiatives for high school students.

KVS on Intel SGX

TEE Systems

Built a key value store on Intel SGX as part of an exploratory venture into Trusted Execution Environments.

Senior year project exploring hardware-based security enclaves.

View code

Projection Mapping

Spatial Installation

Interactive spatial installations built at Ashoka's research and fabrication lab, bridging art and technology.

One of the lab's flagship projects, functioning as an extended research laboratory.

Strange Attractors

Generative Visualization

Interactive visualisation of chaotic dynamical systems with real-time parameter controls and metrics for Lyapunov exponents and correlation dimension.

Exploratory work on Clifford, Lorenz, and Chen attractors.

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