Sean Gao, an assistant CSE professor, has received an Amazon Research Award for his proposal “Interior Search Methods in SMT.” Gao joins a half-dozen CSE faculty members who have been honored by Amazon with this award in the last four years.

Gao is one of 74 researchers from 51 countries to receive an Amazon Research Award this year. His award-winning proposal – an extension of his research on practical algorithms for NP-hard search and optimization problems – was selected for its scientific content, creativity and potential impact.

Professor Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, the Halicioğlu Chair in Computer Architecture, and Ph.D. students Byung Hoon Ahn and Sean Kinzer were nominated for a Design Automation Conference (DAC) Best Paper Award. Their research, Glimpse: Mathematical Embedding of Hardware Specification for Neural Compilation, was chosen as one of six nominees for this prestigious award.

The CSE research team’s paper proposes a previously unexplored approach to optimizing the code for Deep Neural Network (DNN) hardware. They devised a Bayesian optimization framework called Glimpse with multiple exclusively unique components, allowing them to mathematically embed the hardware specifications into the search. When Glimpse was compared with hardware-agnostic compilers, the results indicated faster compilation time and the best inference latency