A recent graduate of CSE's doctoral program has won the top dissertation award in his category. The jury of the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) selected Abbas Rahimi for the Outstanding Dissertations Award 2015 in the area of new directions in embedded system design and embedded software. Rahimi (M.S., Ph.D. '13,'15) was cited for his thesis, "From Variability-Tolerance to Approximate Computing in Parallel Computing Architectures”. His advisor was CSE Chair Rajesh Gupta.
Rahimi (at right) did his doctoral work on microelectronic variability and approximate computing, and he was part of the NSF-funded Variability Expedition as well as the Microelectronic Embedded Systems Laboratory, both led by Prof. Gupta. He also worked as Gupta's teaching assistant in Digital Logic Design in fall 2013. That same year he was a finalist for the best-paper award at the 50th IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC).
Rahimi moved to UC Berkeley last fall to work as a postdoctoral scholar on brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing under Prof. Jan Rabaey in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. His research interests include brain-inspired computing, massively parallel memory-centric architectures and interconnections, embedded systems and software with an emphasis on improving energy efficiency, and robustness in the presence of variability-induced errors and approximation opportunities. In these areas, Rahimi has published more than 30 papers in top-tier conferences and journals.
Rahimi will accept his EDAA award and 1,000-euro prize on March 15 as part of the morning plenary session at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference and exhibition. DATE 2016 takes place at the International Congress Center March 14-18 in Dresden, Germany. Rahimi is one of four winners in separate categories; the others were from Switzerland's EPFL, China's Tsinghua University, and Stanford University.
Read Abbas Rahimi's Ph.D. dissertation.
Learn more about the European Design and Automation Association.
Visit the DATE 2016 website.
Abbas Rahimi's website.