We are pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Zhiyao Xie, who joined the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) as well faculties member and project investigator of the AI Chip Center for Emerging Smart Systems (ACCESS), has received two prestigious PhD dissertation awards in the field of electronic design automation. These awards recognize his outstanding work on "Intelligent Circuit Design and Implementation with Machine Learning", which he completed as part of his PhD in Computer Engineering at Duke University in 2022.
The first award is the Outstanding Dissertations Award 2023 from European Design and Automation Association (EDAA). Prof. Xie was awarded in the category of new directions in logic, physical design and CAD for analog/mixed-signal, nano-scale and emerging technologies. The EDAA presents only one award in each of the four categories. The awards were presented at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference held in Belgium in April this year.
[For details, please check: https://www.edaa.com/]
The second award is the ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation 2023. This award, established by the Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is given annually to an outstanding PhD dissertation that makes the most substantial contribution to the theory and/or application in the field of electronic design automation. The winner is selected by a committee of experts from academia and industry in the field and appointed by ACM in consultation with the SIGDA Chair. The award will be presented at the Design Automation Conference to be held in San Francisco in July this year.
[For details, please check: https://awards.acm.org/sig-awards/sigda]
These two awards are considered the most prestigious dissertation awards in the field of electronic design automation. Prof. Xie is one of only three winners in the past twenty years to receive both awards.
On top of these two awards, Prof. Xie also received a Best Paper Award at the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) 2023 for his co-authored paper on "Rethink before Releasing Your Model: ML Model Extraction Attack in EDA" with collaborators from Duke University and Texas A&M University.
Prof. Xie joined HKUST in June 2022 and is currently leading two research projects under the ACCESS program: "RP3-1: Methodology and EDA Tools for Hardware-Software Co-Design of Deep Neural Networks and AI Algorithms" and "RP3-3: AI-Enhanced Electronic Design Automation (AIEDA)." Prior to joining HKUST, Prof. Xie earned his PhD in Computer Engineering from Duke University, where he completed his dissertation on "Intelligent Circuit Design and Implementation with Machine Learning."
We extend our warmest congratulations to Prof. Xie for his impressive achievements and look forward to his continued contributions to the field of electronic design automation.
