Prof. XIE Zhiyao Won Two Outstanding PhD Dissertation Awards in Electronic Design Automation

Assistant Professor XIE Zhiyao, who joined the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering in June 2022, recently won two prestigious PhD dissertation awards in the field of electronic design automation. The awards recognize his dissertation on “Intelligent Circuit Design and Implementation with Machine Learning” that he completed at the Duke University, US for his PhD in Computer Engineering in 2022.

The first award is the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) Outstanding Dissertations Award 2023. Prof. Xie received the accolade in the category of new directions in logic, physical design and CAD for analog/mixed-signal, nano-scale and emerging technologies. Only one award is given 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.

The second award is the ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation 2023. Established by the Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the award is given each year 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 award will be presented at the Design Automation Conference to be held in San Francisco in July this year.

Prof. Xie is the third PhD graduate ever to receive both of these two dissertation awards – considered the most prestigious in the field of electronic design automation – in the past two decades.

In addition, 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.