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Dharanidhar [DD] Dang

Starting August 2023, I am joining the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Texas, San Antonio (UTSA). At UTSA, I will lead the AI hardware research at the Matrix-AI Consortium.

Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher and past American Association of Immunology (AAI) Fellow in the Boolean Lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where I work with Dr.Debashis Sahoo. My research is focused on designing highly energy-efficient computers using novel technologies such as silicon photonics and resistive memory, for exascale computing tasks such as Cancer prognosis. Prior to joining UCSD, I earned a PhD in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University. At A&M, I worked as a research assistant in the Embedded System & Codesign Lab under Prof. (Dr.) Rabi Mahapatra.

My research interests include silicon photonics, neuromorphic computing, computer architecture, network-on-chip, deep learning, AI hardware, and bioinformatics.

Office: School of Medicine, Building-3 || University of California, San Diego || 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA-92093

Email: dhdang at health dot ucsd dot edu

CV Research Statement Teaching Statement Diversity Statement

Present:

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Boolean Lab (Dept. of CS & Pediatrics) [March 2019 - Present]
- University of California, San Diego (CA), USA
- Supervisor: Dr.Debashis Sahoo

Education:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Computer Engineering [Sep 2012 - Dec 2018 ]
- Texas A&M University, College Station (TX), USA
- Advisor: Dr.Rabi N Mahapatra
- Thesis: Photonic Neuromorphic Architectures for Large-scale Computing
B.Tech in Instrumentation & Electronics Engineering [Fall 2006 - Summer 2010]
- College of Engineering & Technology, Bhubaneswar (Odisha), India
- Advisor: Prof. Tapas K. Patra
- Thesis: Automated Speaker Recognition System

Research Interests: Silicon photonics, VLSI, computer architecture, deep learning, neuromorphic computing, memristive design

Programming skills: C, C++, Python, Verilog, VHDL

EDA tools: IPKISS, Simics, Garnet, Booksim, SPICE, Gem5, Modelsim

Deep learning: Caffe, TensorFlow

Awards & Honors:

Finalist (Top 10) of the Accelerating Innovation to Market (AIM) Grant Challenge of UC San Diego. [10 out of 50 research proposals; 4 will be awarded 100K USD each]
American Association of Immunologists (AAI) Intersect Fellowship [2019-2020]. [10 outstanding PhDs are chosen worldwide by AAI annually to work at the intersection of Computer Science and Immunology]. (Details)
Graduate Teaching Fellow (GTF) in Spring and Fall, 2017. A GTF assumes all the responsibilities of a professor. Details of this coveted fellowship.
Awarded TEES Travel Grants for IEEE ISQED (1000$), ACM/SIGDA GLSVLSI (1000$ + 500$ from ACM), IEEE ICCD (1000$), IEEE/ACM ASP-DAC (1000$).
President, Aggie Cricket Club ( 2016-2017).
Winner of Intel Youth Enterprise (5000 $) 2012. A national-level entrepreneurship competition organized by Intel Corp and DST, India.
Gold Medal, Intel Embedded Challenge 2011. [10 out of 1000 participants from all over India]
Best B.tech Thesis of Dept. I&E, CET, Bhubaneswar.
Runner's up, Scheneider Electric Innovation Challenge 2009 (2000$). [500 participants were shortlisted from all over India]

News:

Joining the Dept of ECE at UTSA as a Tenure-track Assistant Professor this Fall!!!!
US Patent Filed: [Work- Aging-aware Training Scheme]
LiteCON presented at HiPEAC 2023.
Aging-aware Memristor training: a novel training mechanism presented at IEEE/ACM DAC 2022.
LiteCON paper has been accepted to ACM Trans. in Architecture & Code Optimization (TACO).
Chairing a session (Coming to your Chips: Optical Interconnects and NVM Security) at ICCAD 2021.
BPLight-CNN manuscript has been accepted to ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing (JETC).
Lung Macrophages paper has been accepted to Nature Communications Biology. Congratulations team!!
MEMTONIC paper has been accepted to IEEE/ACM DAC 2020!! San Francisco , here we come.
Macrophage paper has been accepted to Frontiers Physiology!! Congrats Sahar.
March-April 2020: Invited talks at IISc-Bangalore, IIT-Bhubaneswar, CET-Bhubaneswar, and VSSUT-Burla!
BPhoton-CNN (A Neuromorphic CNN accelerator) has been accepted to ACM GLSVLSI 2020! See you soon Beijing.
PhD work accepted to ACM/SIGDA DATE 2020!! So a Date in France. :)
Received the prestigious AAI Fellowship. Thanks a lot, Dr.Sahoo & Dr.Prince!!
Two talks at IEEE FMCAD, 2019 (San Jose, CA)
Invited talk on "When Jule/Bits Matters; Neuromorphic Computing Wins!!" at CUT Workshop of IEEE IGSCC, 2019 (Virginia).
Serving in the program committee of HiPC 2019, NOCS 2019, iSES 2019.
Invited talk at Lawrence Berkeley Lab on 16th April.
Joining the Boolean lab, UCSD. Here I come San Diego!!!
Graduated from Texas A&M. Whoopppppppp!!
MReC accepted to ISQED 2019.
Oct 2018: Defended my PhD thesis (Title: Energy-efficient Photonic Archietctures for Large-scale Data Analytics)
August 2018: Invited talk on "Silicon Photonics & Exascale Computing: A Perfect Marriage?" at PSIQuantum, Palo Alto (CA).
April 2018: BigNoC accepted to IEEE TPDS.
Feb 2018: Multilayer PRC paper accepted to DAC 2018.
Dec 2017: ConvLight was presented at HiPC 2017. Jaipur (India), you're amazing!!
I served as a Graduate Teaching Fellow (GTF) in Spring and Fall 2017. As a GTF, I taught CSCE 350 (in Spring) and CSCE 121 (in Fall).
I became a PhD candidate in May 2016.