Vincent Lee (left) and Max Willsey
Allen School Ph.D. students Vincent Lee and Max Willsey have been awarded a 2017 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for their proposal “Program Synthesis for Domain Specific Reconfigurable Accelerators.” Lee and Willsey, who were recommended by professors Ras Bodik, Luis Ceze, and Alvin Cheung, are one of only eight teams to receive a fellowship out of 33 finalists drawn from 116 original proposals received by the company.
Lee and Willsey are working with Bodik, Ceze, and Cheung on a project that aims to leverage solver-aided techniques and program synthesis ideas to design and build domain specific reconfigurable hardware accelerators. The goal of their research, which spans computer architecture, compilers, and programming languages, is to achieve significant performance improvements while simultaneously reducing the energy costs associated with computation. The project is housed in the Allen School’s inter-disciplinary SAMPA group, which advances research across multiple layers of the system stack, including hardware, programming languages, and applications.
The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship program is designed to recognize and support Ph.D. students and their forward-thinking research in a variety of technical areas that are driving computing innovation. This is the fifth year in a row that an Allen School team has earned one of these coveted awards and the second win for Lee, who received a fellowship in 2015 with Carlo del Mundo for their work to develop systems and architecture support for large-scale video search. Winning teams each receive a $100,000 fellowship and mentorship by Qualcomm engineers.
Congratulations, Vincent and Max!