Zhiru Zhang and other attendees of the ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Zhang group receives Best Paper Award 

Prof. Zhiru Zhang and his co-authors Yi-Hsiang Lai, Yuze Chi, Yuwei Hu, Jie Wang, Cody Hao Yu, Yuan Zhou, and Prof. Jason Cong have received the Best Paper Award at the 27th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays held in Seaside, CA, February 24-26, 2019. Their paper, "HeteroCL: A Multi-Paradigm Programming Infrastructure for Software-Defined Reconfigurable Computing" results from a collaborative project between Prof. Zhang’s research group at Cornell and Prof. Cong’s group at UCLA. HeteroCL is a highly productive programming infrastructure for heterogeneous... Read more

Six assistant professors win NSF early-career awards

Over the next five years, each researcher will receive up to $500,000 “to build a firm scientific footing for solving challenges and scaling new heights for the nation, as well as serve as academic role models in research and education,” according to the NSF website. The five assistant professors are: Jayadev Acharya, electrical and computer engineering; Siddhartha Banerjee, operations research and information engineering; Christina Delimitrou, electrical and computer engineering; Nathan Kallus, operations research and information engineering at Cornell Tech; Karola Mészáros, mathematics in... Read more

Soft Robots graphic

Soft Robot Design

A Cornell team of researchers—Robert Shepherd and Hadas Kress-Gazit, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Amit Lal, Electrical and Computer Engineering—are advancing a new class of motors for soft robots. These motors are based on the electrically driven pumping of liquid. Called HASELs (hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic actuators), they have the potential to enable practical and useful soft robots for safe interactions with humans. HASELs represent the first electrostatic soft actuators that are stable and useful enough for broad adoption by experts and non-experts alike... Read more

Rembrandt’s Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves: The Three Crosses (1653) Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Paper trail: how watermarks illuminate Rembrandt's creative process

Original article from The Art Newspaper, February 2019 By Nancy Kenney The Art Newspaper is the journal of record for the visual arts world, covering international news and events. The WIRE Project at Cornell uniting art history and engineering students was co-directed by C. Richard Johnson Geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Andrew Weislogel, The Seymour R. Askin, Jr. '47 Curator, Earlier European and American Art at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum. Three and a half centuries after Rembrandt’s death, questions persist about his creative... Read more

A hamster standing on its two back legs

No-touch sensor measures vital signs of small animals

Typically an animal needs to be sedated and shaved before a veterinarian can take its vital signs. Cornell professor Edwin Kan has designed a device that uses radio waves to measure heartbeat and respiration--all while the critter relaxes in its own environment. Read more

New grant program funds novel conservation collaborations

Using soil to fight climate change, saving the Amazon with wind and solar energy, boosting wildlife conservation through bioacoustics – these innovative approaches are the result of a new competitive grant program aimed at solving some of the world’s biggest sustainability challenges. The 2019-20 Collaborative Research Partnership grant program is the latest collaboration between the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Since 2013, the organizations have worked together on interdisciplinary initiatives including the NatureNet Science Fellows program, which... Read more

Christina Delimitrou

Delimitrou receives NSF CAREER Award

Christina Delimitrou, Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University recently received a U.S. National Science Foundation Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award from the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF). The award supports her research proposal, “Learning-Based Hardware and Software Techniques for Quality-of-Service-Aware Cloud Microservices” for a five-year period from 2019 through 2024 with a total amount of $500,000. According to the award’s abstract, datacenters support a large and ever-increasing fraction of the... Read more

SonicMEMS, a New Edge for Electronics

For decades, electronics have become smaller and faster year by year. This size reduction and concurrent power increase have been dependent on the electronics industry consistently finding ways to increase the number of microcomponents carried by an average microchip. Lately the pace of optimization has slowed so much that some experts think we may have reached the limit of scaling down devices. This would mean the end of the hotly anticipated, ultra-expensive, new product iteration. “If you’re in the integrated circuit business and you don’t have a better technology in three years, then... Read more

Steve Dai receives 2019 ECE Outstanding Thesis Research Award

Steve Dai from Professor Zhiru Zhang’s group has won the prestigious ECE Outstanding Thesis Research Award for 2019. The annual award is given to one graduating Ph.D. student from the Cornell University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, based on the significance of their doctoral research. Steve recently joined NVIDIA Research as a Research Scientist, after successfully defending his PhD thesis titled “Coordinated Static and Dynamic Scheduling for High-Quality High-Level Synthesis”. Steve's thesis tackles the core challenges in today's high-level synthesis (HLS) technology with a... Read more

Ars longa: Rembrandt catalog receives three honors

Museum exhibitions have lives lasting well past their public display – in artistic inspiration, viewers’ memories, online portals and print catalogs. One such catalog, produced by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in 2017, is now a multiple award winner. “Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings” most recently was honored with the College Art Association’s 2019 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Book Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections and Exhibitions. Award winners will be presented during the CAA’s 107th Annual Conference, Feb. 13-16 in New York City. The catalog also received... Read more