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 set of novel optimization and learning-based techniques to deliver better hardware design in a shorter time with less designer effort.

Steve Dai received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2011, and his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2013. Shortly after, Steve joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University as a Ph.D. student in the Computer Systems Laboratory under the guidance of Professor Zhiru Zhang. Steve is broadly interested in electronic design automation (EDA), with an emphasis on enabling high-quality and truly productive high-level hardware design.