Sidharth Kannan

Sidharth Kannan

Research Engineer building efficient agents for electronic design automation

Teaching

PHYS CS 5 - Winter 2026

Undergraduate Colloquium, University of California, Santa Barbara, College of Creative Studies, 2026

I taught this ten-week undergraduate colloquium on non-equilibrium statistical mechanics under the supervision of Ian Banta. The course developed stochastic and microscopic descriptions of systems away from thermal equilibrium, with topics including stochastic processes, transport, Brownian motion, Fokker-Planck dynamics, kinetic theory, hydrodynamics, and projection-operator methods.

CMPTG CS 5 - Spring 2025

Seminar, University of California, Santa Barbara, College of Creative Studies, 2025

I had the privilege of teaching a 10 week seminar course on statistical mechanics and its connections to machine learning theory. We covered the following topics: 1] Boltzmann statistics, 2] the Ising model and mean field theories, 3] Energy based models and Boltzmann machines, 4] Diffusion Models, 5] Fokker-Planck equations and the probability flow ODE, 6] Effective field theories of neural networks, and 7] Neural tangent kernels.