It's a picture worth the proverbial thousand words, but we'll try to tell the story in fewer (words). In late March, researchers from around the world converged on Lausanne, Switzerland, for Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), the leading European event for electronic system design and test research. Among the UC San Diego experts on the program were CSE professor Tajana Rosing (with two papers), and Ph.D. student Armaiti Ardeshiricham (who works in the lab of professor Ryan Kastner). But as the image below attests, there was also a strong alumni turnout at DATE 2017, with at least half a dozen former students who completed their doctorates between 1997 and 2009. Four of the six worked in the Architecture, Reliability and Testing (ART) group of CSE professor Alex Orailoglu. The others did their doctoral dissertations under advisors Tajana Rosing and Andrew Kahng.
The six got together at the conference to catch up and take this photo that depicts the immense success many CSE graduates have found in academia.
Sherief Reda, Wenjing Rao, Ayse Coskun and Chengmo Yang.
The UC San Diego alumni-turned-tenured faculty members are listed here from left to right:
- Ian Harris (Ph.D. '97) organized a co-located workshop on Design Automation for Understanding Hardware Designs at DATE 2017. After completing his Ph.D. under advisor Alex Orailoglu, Harris joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst until 2003, when he returned to California to teach at UC Irvine. He is now an Associate Professor in UC Irvine's Departmnet of Computer Science. His research areas include functional verification, embedded systems security, and electronic design automation from natural language processing.
- Like Harris, Yiorgos Makris (M.S., Ph.D. '97, '01) did his doctorate under Alex Orailoglu. Remarkably, he delivered not one but three papers at DATE 2017. Makris became an Assistant Professor at Yale University following graduation from UC San Diego. After more than a decade teaching at Yale, he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas, where he is now a Professor in the Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. At UT Dallas, he leads the Trusted and RELiable Architectures (TRELA) Research Laboratory. His main research interests lie in the application of machine learning and statistical analysis towards developing reliable and trusted integrated circuits, with particular emphasis in the analog/RF domain.
- Sherief Reda (Ph.D. '06) delivered two presentations at DATE. He did his graduate work in computer engineering under advisor Andrew Kahng, and as a grad student, Reda did internships at both IBM and Intel. From UC San Diego, he joined the Computer Engineering group at Brown University, where he is now an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering. Reda's research interests include design automation and test of integrated circuits, reconfigurable computing, and energy-efficient computing systems. He leads Brown's Scalable Energy-Efficient Computing Laboratory (SCALE).
- Wenjing Rao (Ph.D. '08) is now an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She won CSE's Ph.D. Dissertation Award in 2008 for her thesis "Towards Reliable Nanoelectronic Systems," with Alex Orailoglu as her advisor. Rao was also in the first cohort of Calit2 Fellows when the institute was created in 2001 at UC San Diego (where it is now called the Qualcomm Institute).
- Ayse Coskun (M.S., Ph.D. '06, '09) is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University (BU). At UC San Diego, she was a member of the System Energy Efficiency Lab under advisor Tajana Rosing, Coskun did her dissertation on "Efficient Thermal Management for Multiprocessor Systems." This November, while attending the 2017 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in Irvine, Calif., Coskun will accept a recently-announced IEEE Council of Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) Early Career Award.
- At far right in the photo is Chengmo Yang (M.S., Ph.D. '05, '10). She delivered one paper at DATE (on leveraging access port positions to accelerate page table walk in DWM main memory). Yang did her graduate work in computer science under professor Orailoglu, but is now an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware. Her major research interests are in embedded systems, design automation, and computer architecture.
Looking to the future, BU's Ayse Coskun will play an important role in DATE 2018. The conference is scheduled for March 19-23 in Dresden, Germany, and Coskun is chairing the program committee. She is also chairing "Design, Methods and Tools", one of the major research tracks of next year's DATE conference.