News: ECE

For the second year in a row, ECE Assistant Professor Christina Delimitrou has received a Google Faculty Research Award. The awards recognize and support faculty pursuing cutting-edge technical research in Computer Science, Engineering, and related fields. Delimitrou’s proposal aims to address the performance implications of new cloud programming frameworks, such as microservices. Cloud services increasingly consist of a large number of inter-dependent components (microservices), with performance issues in one application tier propagating to others. Manually diagnosing such correlated... Read more

"Feeding our growing population in a more sustainable and cost-effective way is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity," according to ECE Assistant Professor Kirstin Petersen. "This new era in 'digital agriculture' is dependent on technologies that span engineering disciplines, plant sciences, farming practices, and consumer needs. The CIDA Hackathon is exactly the effort we need to bootstrap these critical and radical innovations." Read more

Jayadev Acharya, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the Best Paper Award at the 31st International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2020), held in San Diego, California earlier this month. The paper was co-authored by Ananda Theertha Suresh, a research scientist at Google. Their paper, “Optimal multiclass overfitting by sequence reconstruction from Hamming queries,” provides a resolution to the problem of overfitting in machine learning. “Often machine learning models are designed and tested on benchmark datasets,” Acharya explained. “Repeatedly... Read more

The Sloan Research Fellowships aim to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists recognized for their distinguished performance and unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Each year, 126 researchers are selected to receive the prestigious and competitive two-year fellowships, which include an award of $75,000. Prof. Delimitrou’s selection highlights her team’s work to apply data-driven machine learning approaches to large-scale systems problems. “This is an approach we have previously applied to cloud management in datacenters,” Delimitrou said. “We... Read more

ECE faculty members Jayadev Acharya, Anthony Reeves, Mert Sabuncu and Qing Zhao are members of a new Cornell research group — Machine Learning in Medicine — focused on improving methods for disease detection and diagnosis. Investigators from Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell-Ithaca with interest in machine learning applied to clinical questions and data will have the opportunity to learn about each member's work, begin collaborations, co-mentor students and co-author grants. Read more

The annual award is typically given to one graduating Ph.D. student from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, based on the significance of their doctoral research. This year, two winners were honored, each receiving a $1500.00 cash award. Yingjie Bi‘s thesis focuses on the theory of nonconvex optimization. His research proposes new methods to analyze the performance of algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems. His faculty advisor is Kevin Tang. “My research could potentially help people to design better algorithms for nonconvex problems raised in many fields such as... Read more

The College of Engineering has announced the winners of the annual Scale-Up and Prototyping Awards, which give teams of engineering faculty and students up to $40,000 to commercialize startup technologies that might otherwise have trouble obtaining funding. ECE faculty members Khurram Afridi, Huili Grace Xing, and Debdeep Jena lead two of the four winning teams. Read more

DeathStarBench, an open-source benchmark suite for microservices from Prof. Christina Delimitrou’s group has received an IEEE Micro Top Pick Award for the most significant papers based on novelty and long-term impact from the architecture conferences of 2019. Delimitrou's students Yu Gan and Yanqi Zhang were co-authors on the paper. It describes the system implications of cloud microservices, and presents DeathStarBench, a set of representative end-to-end cloud and IoT applications built with microservices. Delimitrou, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, leads a group... Read more

Sabuncu’s award will fund the development of new machine learning-based tools to analyze brain images, which are complex and challenging to interpret. The project will advance existing artificial intelligence research to address large-scale image analysis. The new tools will then be used to map genetic effects on human brain morphology in UK Biobank data. Sabuncu will also develop relevant educational material for a range of audiences. Read more

Qing Zhao, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering & Director of Graduate Studies for ECE, has been named to the 2020 Class of Distinguished Lecturers by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). She is among a select group of only five professors to be so honored from universities in the United States and around the world. The IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer Program gives IEEE Chapters access to well-known educators and authors in the fields of signal processing who are available to lecture at Chapter meetings. While many IEEE Societies have similar programs, the SPS provides a... Read more