Program

Alex Jones (National Science Foundation & University of Pittsburgh)

Alex Jones is a NSF Program Director in the CNS division of CISE at the National Science Foundation. He is also a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include computer and memory architectures, particularly for low energy and fault tolerant computing, in-memory processing, compilers, sustainable computing, and design automation, among others. He is the author of more than 200 publications in these areas. His research is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, DARPA, the NSA, the laboratory of physical sciences (LPS), and industry. Dr. Jones’ has received an ACM/SIGDA Distinguished Service Award, a seminal paper award from FCCM Carnegie Science Award, among several best paper and best paper nominations. He serves on many journal editorial boards and conference committees including in area of sustainability, the IEEE Transactions on Computers, Elsevier SUSCOM, MICRO, ISCA, DATE, among others. He chairs the SC of IEEE IGSC, and is on the SC for GLSVLSI. In his spare time he performs as the principal clarinetist with the Pittsburgh Philharmonic and Aeolian Winds and enjoys skiing and Tae Kwon Do.

Erik Brunvand (National Science Foundation & University of Utah) [slides]

Erik Brunvand joined the NSF as a Program Director in the Computer and Network Systems (CNS) division in September 2019. He is primarily managing programs in the Computer Systems Research (CSR) cluster within CNS. He is on leave from the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, where he is a Professor in the School of Computing. His research interests are in computer architecture, specifically architectures for computer graphics, asynchronous and self-timed systems, VLSI design, and arts/technology collaborations.

Amarda Shehu (National Science Foundation & George Mason University) [slides]

Dr. Amarda Shehu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Computing and Engineering at George Mason University. She is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnerships (CAHMP), a Transdisciplinary Center for Advanced Study at George Mason University. Shehu currently serves as Program Director in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. She is a recent Fellow of the American Society of Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE). Shehu is currently the chair of the steering committee of the ACM/IEEE Journal on Transactions in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where she is also an associate editor. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, and her research is regularly supported by various NSF programs, including Information Integration and Informatics, Robust Intelligence, Computing Core Foundations, and Software Infrastructure, as well as various state and private research awards. Shehu is also the recipient of the 2021 Beck Family Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Research and Scholarship, the 2018 Mason University Teaching Excellence Award, the 2014 Mason Emerging Researcher/Scholar/Creator Award, and the 2013 Mason OSCAR Undergraduate Mentor Excellence Award. She has published over 150 technical papers with postdoctoral, graduate, undergraduate, and high-school students, and she is particularly proud of awards recognizing research and scholarship by the undergraduate and high-school students she has mentored over the years.

Mahdi Nikdast (Colorado State University) [slides]

Dr. Mahdi Nikdast is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins, and the director of Electronic–Photonic System Design (ECSyD) Laboratory at CSU, since 2017. From 2014 to 2017, he was a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University and Polytechnique Montreal, Canada. His research is focused on the intersection of high-performance computing, integrated photonics, and electronic–photonic design automation. His research in this area has been recognized with multiple awards and nominations from both EDA&VLSI and photonics communities. He received the NSF CAREER award in early 2021.

Yingyan Lin (Rice University) [slides]

Yingyan (Celine) Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. She leads the Efficient and Intelligent Computing (EIC) Lab at Rice, which focuses on efficient machine learning techniques towards green AI and ubiquitous machine learning-powered intelligence. She received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, IBM Faculty Award, and Facebook Research Award, and currently the lead PI on multiple multi-university projects (e.g., RTML and 3DML). Her group has been funded by both federal funding agencies including NSF, DARPA, ONR, NIH and various top IT companies including IBM, Facebook, Qualcomm, and Intel.

Ulf Schlichtmann (Technical University of Munich) [slides]

Ulf Schlichtmann holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Technical University of Munich (TUM), as well as a technology business degree. He spent about 10 years in the semiconductor industry (Siemens, Infineon) in various engineering, management and executive positions, working on design automation, design libraries, IP reuse, and product development.

In 2003, he joined TUM as professor and head of the Chair of Electronic Design Automation. From 2007-2013 he served as Dean and Vice Dean of TUM’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Since 2013, he serves as Associate Dean of Studies for International Programs, overseeing both the Department’s educational programs in Singapore and English language programs in Munich. Since 2016, Ulf is an elected member of TUM’s Academic Senate as well as the TUM Board of Trustees. He is a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering, and a board member of Germany’s edacentrum. Ulf serves on various private and public advisory boards, among them the advisory board of TUM’s Institute for Advanced Studies and the Bavarian School of Public Policy. Since 2021, he also serves as CEO of TUM’s Singapore research center, TUMCREATE.

Ulf’s current research interests include computer-aided design of electronic circuits and systems, with an emphasis on designing reliable and robust systems. His research especially addresses emerging technologies, such as microfluidic biochips, photonic interconnects, optical computing, and memristor-based neural network accelerators.

Nicholas Cramer (NASA) [slides]

Nick Cramer is a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center in the Intelligent Systems Division. His research areas are distributed systems, autonomy, robotic, and intelligent structures. Nick is currently the project manager for Distributed Spacecraft Autonomy which is developing and maturing autonomous multi-spacecraft software to enable future NASA missions.

David Junkin (Cadence)

David Junkin has spent the last 25 years teaching engineers to design, implement, utilize, and sell integrated circuit chips. In both EDA and the semiconductor markets, he has helped educate analog, digital, and system engineers on how to leverage tools to deliver tomorrow's innovations. David has a passion for solving challenging, technical problems and sharing these solutions with others—a passion that has driven his journey from a master’s and PhD in Physics to FAE management at Avant!, from timing closure bootcamps at Magma Design Automation, to a signature new-college-hire technical onboarding program at Texas Instruments. He is currently the Academic Network Program Director for Cadence.

Patrick R. Haspel (Synopsys)

Patrick Haspel is passionate about connecting universities and academics with industry and creating mutually beneficial opportunities for one another. As the global director of the Academic Partnerships and University Programs at Synopsys, Patrick and his team foster enduring university partnerships and create programs that support students, educators, and researchers. APUP’s portfolio of projects ranges from enabling access to latest and greatest products through technology deployment, to targeted research engagements that address the ever-evolving challenges of the semiconductor industry.

Patrick started his career at the University of Mannheim where he gave lectures on computer architecture, digital design and verification and the front-to-back synthesis, place & route flow and researched low-latency communication networks for high performance compute clusters. He joined Cadence in 2005 to develop and build the Cadence Academic Network, and eventually managed the global expansion from Cadence’s headquarters in San Jose, California. In 2020, Patrick joined Synopsys in his current role.

Patrick received his diploma in Computer Engineering and his Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim, Germany.

Alessandro Pinto (Raytheon Technologies)

Alessandro Pinto is a Technical Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Department of the Raytheon Technologies Research Center (RTRC). He is responsible for the autonomous and intelligent system technical focus area and has been leading research in the area of autonomous systems engineering since 2010. Dr. Pinto received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. His current interests include the architectural design of autonomous systems, knowledge representation, algorithms for high-level reasoning and decision-making, safety assurance for autonomous systems, and compositional design methodologies. He is the recipient of the 2014 UTC Outstanding Achievement Award for his contributions in the area of Autonomous Rotorcraft Technology Development and Demonstration, and of the 2016 UTRC Technical Excellence Award. He served as PI or Co-PI in several DARPA, ONR, and NASA programs in the area of compositional design methodologies and autonomous system design, spanning requirement engineering, modeling, and reasoning methods.

Yiyu Shi (University of Notre Dame) [slides]

Dr. Yiyu Shi is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, the site director of National Science Foundation I/UCRC Alternative and Sustainable Intelligent Computing, and the director of the Sustainable Computing Lab (SCL). He is also a visiting scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital, the primary pediatric program of Harvard Medical School. He received his B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2005, the M.S and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007 and 2009 respectively. His current research interests focus on hardware intelligence and biomedical applications. In recognition of his research, more than a dozen of his papers have been nominated for or awarded as the best paper in top journals and conferences, including the 2021 IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design Donald O Pederson Best Paper Award. He is also the recipient of Facebook Research Award, IBM Invention Achievement Award, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Faculty Invitation Fellowship, Humboldt Research Fellowship, IEEE St. Louis Section Outstanding Educator Award, Academy of Science (St. Louis) Innovation Award, Missouri S&T Faculty Excellence Award, NSF CAREER Award, IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Individual Achievement Award, the Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship, and IEEE Computer Society Mid-Career Research Achievement Award. He has served on the technical program committee of many international conferences. He is the deputy editor-in-chief of IEEE VLSI CAS Newsletter, and an associate editor of various IEEE and ACM journals. He is an IEEE CEDA distinguished lecturer and an ACM distinguished speaker.

Chuchu Fan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) [slides]

Chuchu Fan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Before that, she was a postdoc researcher at Caltech and got her Ph.D. from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University, Department of Automation, in 2013. Her group at MIT works on using rigorous mathematics including formal methods, machine learning, and control theory for the design, analysis, and verification of safe autonomous systems. Chuchu is the winner of the 2020 ACM Dissertation Award.

Shimeng Yu (Georgia Institute of Technology) [slides]

Shimeng Yu is currently an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received the B.S. degree in microelectronics from Peking University in 2009, and the M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2011 and 2013, respectively. From 2013 to 2018, he was an assistant professor at Arizona State University.

Prof. Yu’s research interests are the semiconductor devices and integrated circuits for energy-efficient computing systems. His research expertise is on the emerging non-volatile memories for applications such as deep learning accelerator, in-memory computing, 3D integration, and hardware security.

Among Prof. Yu’s honors, he was a recipient of NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award in 2016, IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Early Career Award in 2017, ACM Special Interests Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2018, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Young Faculty Award in 2019, ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2020, and IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) Distinguished Lecturer, and IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Distinguished Lecturer, etc.

Prof. Yu has served many premier conferences as technical program committee, including IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology, IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS), ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), ACM/IEEE Design, Automation & Test in Europe (DATE), ACM/IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided-Design (ICCAD), etc. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

Partha Pratim Pande (Washington State University, Pullman) [slides]

Partha Pratim Pande (M'05-SM'11-F'20) is a Professor and holder of the Boeing Centennial Chair in computer engineering at the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, USA. He is currently the director of the school. His current research interests are novel interconnect architectures for manycore chips, on-chip wireless communication networks, and heterogeneous architectures. Dr. Pande currently serves as the Associate Editor-in-Chief (A-EIC) of IEEE Design and Test (D&T). He is the incoming EIC of D&T. He is on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on VLSI (TVLSI) and ACM Journal of Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC) and IEEE Embedded Systems letters. He was the technical program committee chair of IEEE/ACM Network-on-Chip Symposium 2015 and CASES (2019-2020). He also serves on the program committees of many reputed international conferences. He has won the NSF CAREER award in 2009. He is the winner of the Anjan Bose outstanding researcher award from the college of engineering, Washington State University in 2013.

Benjamin Braaten (North Dakota State University) [slides]

Benjamin D. Braaten is the Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at North Dakota State University. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2002, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2009, all from North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA. During the 2009 Fall semester, he held a Postdoctoral Research Position in the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD, USA. At the end of the 2009 Fall Semester, he joined the Faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, North Dakota State University, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015 and Professor in 2019. He was interim chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department from 2017 – 2018. He has authored or co-authored more than 160+ peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, several book chapters on the design of antennas for radio frequency identification, and holds two U.S. patents on the wireless pacing of the human heart. His research interests include printed antennas, conformal self-adapting antennas, microwave devices, topics in EMC, topics in BIOEM, and methods in computational electromagnetics. Dr. Braaten received the College of Engineering and Architecture Graduate Researcher of the Year and College of Engineering and Architecture Graduate Teacher of the Year awards. He also served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS from 2015 - 2021 and is currently an Associate Editor for the IET Microwaves, Antennas and Propagation Journal, and is a member of the National Honorary Mathematical Society PI MU EPSILON, IEEE HKN and the National Academy for Inventors.