CSE Alumna Accept Major Award in Electronic Design Automation
CSE alumna Ayse Coskun (Ph.D. ’09) is back in Southern California on Monday, November 13 accepting an award from the Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA). The 2017 IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award will be given to Coskun during the opening session in Irvine of the 36th International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), the premier conference devoted to technical innovations in electronic design automation (EDA).
“I am delighted to accept the Early Career Award,” said Coskun, who is now a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boston University (BU). “I am particularly honored because the award is available to a large number of outstanding nominees from both industry and academia, so the competition must have been intense.”
Coskun credits some of her success to her years at UC San Diego, where she worked in the System Energy Efficiency Lab (SEE Lab) led by her Ph.D. advisor, CSE Professor Tajana Simunic Rosing. “There is a direct line from my work with Prof. Rosing to my current research interests,” said Coskun. “I started my projects on proactive thermal management and 3D-stacked architectures while I was a Ph.D. student at UC San Diego.” Other current interests of Coskun include modeling and optimizing systems with new technologies (e.g., systems with optical networks or co-design with cutting edge nanoscale cooling devices) and large-scale system analytics for cloud and HPC systems.
The Early Career Award honors an individual who has made innovative and substantial technical contributions to the area of Electronic Design Automation in the early stages of his or her career. To qualify for consideration, candidates must be nominated no more than eight years after receiving their Ph.D. (or other terminal degree).
2017 has been a year of honors for the CSE alumna. Earlier this year, Coskun and her group accepted the Gauss Award. The collaborative BU and Sandia Labs team led by Coskun took home the award (and 3,000 euros) for their research paper on “Diagnosing Performance Variations in HPC Applications Using Machine Learning” at the 2017 ISC High Performance Conference (ISC 2017) last June in Frankfurt, Germany. This year Coskun also received a Dean’s Catalyst Award from BU – an award she also received in 2010 in her first year on the BU faculty.
Coskun also received two key grants in the past six months. She is the principal investigator of an interdisciplinary project with colleagues from BU, Brown University, and MIT. They received a $700,000 NSF grant over the summer for research on advanced processor cooling methods (with roughly one-third of the funding research in Coskun’s lab). A co-PI on the same project and collaborator with Coskun is also a CSE alumnus, Sherief Reda (Ph.D. ’06).
In the spring, Sandia National Laboratories awarded a $490,000 grant to Coskun and fellow BU professor Manuel Egele, They will use the funding to design automated analytics for improving efficiency and security of high-performance computing systems. Specifically, they aim to identify which data collected out of HPC systems would be useful for identifying performance characteristics, inefficiencies, and malicious behavior. Subsequently, Coskun and Egele will design automated methods to leverage these data to take runtime actions to improve efficiency and security.
Professor Coskun’s past recognitions include an NSF CAREER Award in 2012, and in 2011, a Best Paper Award from the High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) Conference. Also in 2011, she was named a Junior Faculty Fellow at the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing at BU. Coskun is currently an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design.
The CSE alumna is also looking to the future, notably March 2018 and the Design, Automation and Test in Europe conference (DATE 2018) in Dresden, Germany. Coskun is the Program Chair of this large pioneer conference in electronic design automation.
Coskun’s Ph.D. advisor, CSE Professor Rosing, will also be attending ICCAD in Irvine, CA. She is scheduled to speak at the 10th IEEE/ACM Workshop on Variability, Modeling and Characterization (VMC 2017), co-located with ICCAD.