Ryan Modafe

Ryan is an Electrical Engineering student at UC Santa Barbara, class of 2029. He joined OPUS Lab in the summer of 2026, where he has been working on the sparsification of large language models (LLMs) to improve the computational and energy efficiency of AI inference. He is particularly interested in developing efficient algorithms and computational approaches for large-scale AI systems. Outside of academics and research, Ryan enjoys playing piano and soccer.

Publications

Kyle Lee, Christian Z. Pratt, Ruoyu Fang, Heekyung Lee, Avinash Lohitsa, Ryan Modafe, and Kerem Y. Camsari. “SANTA++: Sampling Attention through Representative Keys.” arXiv:2609.35629, 2026.