Tanay Desai

Year in School
Sophomore

Major
Computer Science

Research Interests
Artificial Intelligence

Research Mentor

Research/Engagement Experience

Interests

Project Title

How did I get interested in Computer Science?
I got into CS sideways. In high school, my school library was still running on paper cards and a battered Excel sheet, and someone needed to fix it. I said I'd try. What came out, a Java and SQL library management system serving 800 students and a 10,000-book catalog, wasn't elegant, but it ran, and watching a librarian scan a book and see the row update was the first time code felt less like a puzzle and more like infrastructure. The turning point came a few months later, digging into machine learning for an Air Quality Index project. I expected to feed data into scikit-learn and be done. Instead I got stuck on why RBF-kernel SVMs and Euclidean-distance KNN behaved so differently on the same pollutant time series. One was globally decisive, the other locally faithful, and neither was right alone. That question turned into a review of 30+ prior studies and eventually a first-author Springer paper proposing a hybrid SVM/KNN architecture: SVM for global classification, KNN for local refinement. What hooked me wasn't the publication. It was realizing the interesting problem was almost never the model. It was the shape of the assumption the model was making, and where that shape broke. At UIUC, that instinct has split in two directions. On the theory side, I'm drawn to why algorithms behave the way they do, and CS 173 and CS 225 have been the most satisfying courses I've taken. On the teaching side, tutoring CS 124 has become its own kind of proof: watching a student's face when recursion clicks is evidence an idea can transfer intact from one mind to another. I want to keep working at that intersection.

What social interests matter to me?

Why did you choose Illinois?
Illinois wasn't a single reason so much as a stack of them that kept lining up. The obvious pull was the CS program itself. Grainger Engineering has one of the strongest CS departments in the country, and the coursework reflects it. Classes like CS 173 and CS 225 aren't just well-taught, they're taught with a seriousness about theory and rigor that I hadn't seen described the same way anywhere else I looked. For someone whose interests sit at the intersection of ML, algorithms, and CS education, that mattered more than any ranking on paper. Faculty were part of it too. The research coming out of UIUC in machine learning and theoretical CS is genuinely deep, and it's the kind of place where an undergraduate who shows up with real questions can find someone doing serious work on them. That's not true everywhere. The offer helped make the decision feel light rather than heavy. Getting in with James Scholar Honors and a financial package that made the numbers work meant I wasn't choosing Illinois around a compromise, I was choosing it because it was the strongest fit and the finances agreed. And then there's the less quantifiable part. Visiting campus, I liked the culture more than I expected to. It's a big school that somehow doesn't feel like one, and the students I met were curious in a way that felt collaborative rather than competitive. The CS+X programs, the sheer scale of what's available, the fact that CS 124 alone teaches roughly a thousand students a semester and still finds room to hire undergraduates like me as tutors, all of that pointed to a place that took undergraduate learning seriously as a first-class thing, not an afterthought. Put together, Illinois wasn't the safe choice or the ambitious choice. It was just, honestly, the right one.

What are your passions outside of computing?
Outside of computing, most of my life happens in the space between a screen, a page, and a court. I'm a movie freak in the specific sense that I'll rewatch a scene fifteen times to figure out why a cut works. I gravitate toward Hindi cinema, where the emotional grammar is louder and the songs are load-bearing rather than decorative. A well-staged Bhansali frame does something to me that a tidy Hollywood two-shot rarely does. I read the same way I watch: obsessively and a little sideways. I've been hooked to thrillers lately. Books are how I stay honest about the fact that computing is a small room in a much larger house. Sports are the counterweight. I play pickleball and badminton, both of which reward the same thing: fast pattern recognition inside a small court, and the discipline to not overhit. Badminton in particular is a game about restraint, since the shuttle punishes ego almost immediately. Pickleball is friendlier, more social, and has become my default way to spend an afternoon with people who aren't going to talk about compilers. What ties these together, honestly, is that they all reward paying close attention to something for its own sake. A film's edit, a paragraph's argument, a rally's rhythm. None of them scale, none of them optimize, and that's the point. They keep the part of me that likes CS from becoming the only part of me that exists.

What has been one of your favorite experiences at Illinois that you would like to share with prospective students? (For Continuing UIUC Students)

What has been one of your favorite experiences as a CS STAR? (For Returning CS STARS)

What is my most impactful college experience?

These are a few of my favorite things!
Long, unserious hangouts with family and friends, where nothing is being decided and everyone is a little dumber than they are in public. Rainy weather, especially the kind that settles in for a whole afternoon and makes the inside of a room the most interesting place to be. A well-cut scene in a Hindi film. I'll rewind fifteen times to figure out why it works. Pickleball on a slow evening, badminton when I want the shuttle to punish my ego.

Research Description

Biography
I was born and brought up in Gujarat, India. I've always been pulled toward technology, problem solving, and computer science, and somewhere along the way I decided that this was the path through which I'd try to make an impact.That instinct has taken shape at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I'm a Computer Science undergraduate in the Class of 2029, studying on a 4.0 GPA with James Scholar Honors. My interests sit at the intersection of machine learning, algorithms, and CS education. I'm first author on a Springer paper on hybrid SVM/KNN models for Air Quality Index prediction, and most recently built Meter, an autonomous payment system for AI agents, at the Prava Agentic Commerce Hackathon 2026. I also tutor CS 124, UIUC's flagship intro course, which has quietly become one of the most rewarding parts of my week. My family has always supported me in carving my own path and chasing whatever I found interesting, and that encouragement still shapes how I approach both CS and life more broadly.