A portrait of Hetvi Shastri

Hetvi Shastri

About

Foundation models are powerful, but serving them at scale is all about tradeoffs. I build the systems that get those tradeoffs right.

I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UMass Amherst, advised by Prof. Prashant Shenoy, and I collaborate with Prof. Mani Srivastava's lab at UCLA. My work balances fairness and efficiency when many tasks share one model, correctness and efficiency in stateful generative media workflows, and modularity and scalability in composable model pipelines.

I've taken these ideas into industry too: as a summer intern at Dolby Labs, I built cross-modal caching for iterative GenAI workflows, and at Nokia Bell Labs, I worked on trust in decentralized wireless networks. Both led to patent applications.

Before UMass, I earned my B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering (minor in CS) at IIT Gandhinagar, working with Prof. Nipun Batra and Prof. Himanshu Shekhar.

FMTK: A Modular Toolkit for Composable Time Series Foundation Model Pipelines

Hetvi Shastri, Pragya Sharma, Walid A. Hanafy, Mani Srivastava, and Prashant Shenoy

NeurIPS 2025, Workshop on Recent Advances in Time Series Foundation Models

LLM-Driven Auto Configuration for Transient IoT Device Collaboration

Hetvi Shastri, Walid A. Hanafy, Li Wu, David Irwin, Mani Srivastava, and Prashant Shenoy

ACM/IEEE SEC 2025

Rethinking Collaboration Among Mobile Devices in IoT Environments

Hetvi Shastri, Walid A. Hanafy, Li Wu, David Irwin, Mani Srivastava, and Prashant Shenoy

ACM SenSys 2025, Poster

Trust or Bust: A Survey of Threats in Decentralized Wireless Networks

Hetvi Shastri, Akanksha Atrey, Andre Beck, and Nirupama Ravi

NDSS Symposium 2025, FutureG Workshop

I Do Not Know: Quantifying Uncertainty in Neural Network Based Approaches for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Hetvi Shastri, Vibhuti Bansal, Rohit Khoiwal, Haikoo Khandor, and Nipun Batra

ACM BuildSys 2022 · Paper

Vastr-GAN: Versatile Apparel Synthesised from Text Using a Robust Generative Adversarial Network

Hetvi Shastri, Dhruvi Lodhavia, Palak Purohit, Ronak Kaoshik, and Nipun Batra

ACM CODS-COMAD 2022 · Paper

Neural Network Approaches and Dataset Parser for NILM Toolkit

Hetvi Shastri and Nipun Batra

ACM BuildSys 2021 · Paper

News

Jun 2026

Starting Ph.D. Research Internship at Dolby Labs, working on stateful cross-modal caching for iterative GenAI workflows!!

Jun 2026

Reviewer for S3 workshop, MobiCom 2026.

Apr 2026

Artifact Evaluator for OSDI 2026.

Dec 2025

Presenting FMTK at the Recent Advances in Time Series Foundation Models workshop, NeurIPS 2025!!

Dec 2025

Presenting our paper on LLM-driven auto configuration for transient IoT device collaboration at ACM/IEEE SEC 2025, with a student travel grant. Also serving as a student volunteer!

2025

Received the Invention Filing Award from Nokia Bell Labs for the ConnCast patent application.

Aug 2025

Reviewer for S3 workshop, MobiCom 2025.

Aug 2025

Artifact Evaluator for EuroSys 2026.

May 2025

Presenting CollabIoT poster at Sensys 2025!!

April 2025

Working at Prof Mani Srivastava's lab, UCLA for a week!!

March 2025

CollabIoT poster accepted at Sensys 2025!!

Feb 2025

ConnCast patent accepted for filing at Nokia Bell Labs!!

Jan 2025

Paper at Nokia Bell Labs internship accepted at FutureG workshop, NDSS!!

June 2024

Starting internship at Nokia Bell Labs, New Jersey!!

Aug 2023

Awarded travel grant for attending ACM SIGCOMM 2023 at New York.

Jun 2023

Selected for the prestigious GHC Student Scholarship, enabling participation at the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration 2023 (GHC 23).

May 2023

Awarded the distinguished James Kurose Scholarship at UMass Amherst for exceptional achievements in Computer Science.

May 2023

Granted the esteemed David W. Stemple Scholarship at UMass Amherst in recognition of excellence in pursuing Ph.D. research in Systems.

Nov 2022

Presenting our paper on quantifying uncertainty in NILM at ACM BuildSys 2022.

Sep 2022

Paper on quantifying uncertainty in NILM accepted at ACM BuildSys 2022.

Sep 2022

Starting MS+Ph.D. in computer science at LASS lab, UMass Amherst advised by Prof. Prashant Shenoy.

Jan 2022

Presenting our paper on Generative Adversarial Networks for fashion clothing at CODs COMAD 2022.

Jan 2022

Started working as a Teaching Assistant for ML654 course, IITGn.

Nov 2021

Presenting our paper on Neural network models for NILM at ACM Buildsys 2021.

Nov 2021

Awarded Conference Grant by IIT Gandhinagar for presenting at 8th ACM Buildsys 2021.

Oct 2021

Our paper on Generative Adversarial Networks for fashion clothing accepted at CODs COMAD 2022.

Sep 2021

First paper on Neural network models for NILM accepted at ACM Buildsys 2021.

May 2021

Started working on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring at Sustainability Lab, IITGn advised by Prof Nipun Batra.

May 2020

Started working on ultrasound imaging at MUSE Lab, IITGn advised by Prof Himanshu Shekhar.

Jul 2018

Started Btech in Electrical Engineering at Indian Institue of Technology Gandhinagar.

Research Projects

Virtualizing Foundation Models for Efficient Multi-Task Serving

Existing foundation model serving systems replicate heavyweight backbones per task, wasting GPU memory and losing batching opportunities across the many downstream tasks a single foundation model can serve. We built a serving system with a virtual foundation model (vFM) abstraction and a batch-aware fair-queueing scheduler, letting many customized tasks share one backbone with per-task isolation and cross-task batching. It reduces latency by up to 80% vs. spatial partitioning and 33.3% vs. best-effort co-location, and hosts 6x more tasks at cluster scale across 7 FM backbones (16 variants) and 92 downstream tasks.

Architecture of the FMTK toolkit

FMTK: Modular Toolkit for Time Series Foundation Model Pipelines

Time Series Foundation Model (TSFM) research relies on ad hoc, model-specific pipelines that hinder modularity, reproducibility, and large-scale experimentation. FMTK provides a unified API for plug-and-play TSFM pipelines, generalizable across domains and demonstrated on ECG, PPG, and energy tasks with PyTorch and PEFT.

Decentralized wireless network testbed setup

Attacks in Trustless Decentralized Wireless Networks

Decentralized wireless networks, where individual entities offer subscriptionless connectivity in exchange for monetary reward, lack mechanisms for trust. We developed a taxonomy of attacks and simulated provider-driven attacks with TC/netem and Nginx on a Raspberry Pi testbed, showing up to 394% monetary profit for malicious actors. We proposed ConnCast, a super-peer-based P2P framework for real-time connectivity experience sharing that uses proofs of network connectivity (PoNC) and proofs of experience (PoE) to prevent adversarial provider behavior. (Nokia Bell Labs internship)

Project visual for LLM-Driven Auto Configuration

LLM-Driven Auto Configuration for Transient IoT Device Collaboration

Transient IoT setups face device heterogeneity, fine-grained access control, and non-expert usability challenges. We built a system that uses an LLM-driven pipeline (Ollama, PydanticAI) to generate fine-grained access control policies from user intent, enforces them with capability-based JWTs, and uses lightweight async proxies with token-bucket rate limiting for hardware-independent enforcement.

Project visual for Quantifying Uncertainty in NILM

Quantifying Uncertainty in Neural Network Based Approaches for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM)

False positives and negatives which is crucial for informed decision about energy usage in the realm of energy disaggregation. We refined uncertainty quantification through recalibration methods on 14 diverse deep learning models on the REDD dataset.

Project visual for Quantifying Uncertainty in NILM

Neural network approaches and dataset parser for nilm toolkit

Total energy consumption disaggregation into individual appliances helps households in understanding and curbing energy usage. We used cutting-edge models including Residual Network (ResNet), RNN with attention, and hybrid Regression-Classification networks for precise energy disaggregation on REDD and IDEAL datasets.

Project visual for Quantifying Uncertainty in NILM

Vastr-gan: Versatile apparel synthesised from text using a robust generative adversarial network

Addressed the challenge of harmonizing diverse cultural, geographical, and creative factors in Indian fashion to effectively cater to personalized design demands. Curated an extensive Indian fashion dataset and employed GANs for intricate text-to-image synthesis. Applied ensemble learning with diverse class divisions and enhanced image synthesis via a YOLO-based classifier-integrated architecture.

Experience

Dolby Labs

Ph.D. Research Intern

Jun 2026 – Oct 2026

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Research Assistant, LASS Lab

Sep 2022 – Present

Nokia Bell Labs

Decentralized Systems Intern

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024

IIT Gandhinagar

Undergraduate Researcher

Sep 2018 – Aug 2022

Teaching

  • UMass Amherst: Distributed and Operating Systems, Computer Systems, Programming
  • IIT Gandhinagar: Machine Learning (Grad)

Awards & Honors

  • Student Travel Grant, ACM/IEEE SEC 2025
  • Invention Filing Award, Nokia Bell Labs, 2025
  • Student Travel Grant, ACM SIGCOMM 2023
  • Grace Hopper Celebration Scholarship, GHC 2023
  • James Kurose Scholarship, UMass Amherst, 2023
  • David W. Stemple Scholarship for Systems Research, UMass Amherst, 2023
  • Conference Grant, BuildSys 2021, IIT Gandhinagar
  • Dean's List (3 semesters), IIT Gandhinagar

Service

  • Artifact Evaluator: OSDI 2026, EuroSys 2026
  • Reviewer: ACM S3 Workshop (MobiCom 2026, MobiCom 2025)
  • Student Volunteer: ACM/IEEE SEC 2025
  • Guest Lecturer: Machine Learning (Grad), UMass Turing Program (high school students)
  • Open Source: NILMTK, NILMTK-Contrib