Prof. Deming Chen

Professor, Co-Director, IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Deming Chen obtained his BS in computer science from University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1995, and his MS and PhD in computer science from University of California at Los Angeles in 2001 and 2005 respectively. He worked as a software engineer between 1995-1999 and 2001-2002. He joined the ECE department of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 and has been a full professor in the same department since 2015. He is a research professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory and an affiliate professor in the CS department. His current research interests include reconfigurable computing, cloud computing, system-level and high-level synthesis, machine learning and IoT, and hardware security. He has given more than 160 invited talks sharing these research results worldwide. His work has had a significant impact, with open-source solutions adopted by industry, such as FCUDA, DNNBuilder, CSRNet, SkyNet, ScaleHLS, and Medusa. Notably, Medusa has been integrated into Nvidia’s TensorRT-LLM, improving the speed of large language model (LLM) execution by 1.9-3.6x.

Dr. Chen has been a technical committee member for a series of top conferences and symposia on EDA, FPGA, low-power design, and embedded systems design. He has also served as General or TPC Chair, Track Chair, Session Chair, Panelist, Panel Organizer, or Moderator for many of these conferences. He has been an associated editor for IEEE TCAD, ACM TODAES, IEEE TVLSI, ACM TRETS, IEEE TCAS-I and TCAS-II, IEEE Design & Test, IET Cyber-Physical Systems, JCSC, and JOLPE. He obtained the Achievement Award for Excellent Teamwork from Aplus Design Technologies in 2001, the Arnold O. Beckman Research Award from UIUC in 2007, the NSF CAREER Award in 2008, ten Best Paper Awards, a TCFPGA Hall-of-Fame paper award, and a few Best Poster Awards. He also received the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2010, IBM Faculty Award in 2014 and 2015, and Google Faculty Award in 2020. In 2017 and 2019 respectively, he led a team to win the First Place Winner Award of DAC International System Design Contest. He is the Donald Willett Faculty Scholar and the Abel Bliss Professor of the Grainger College of Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Speaker, and the former Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS). Under his leadership, the impact factor of ACM TRETS has increased by 3.8 times. He is the Director of the AMD-Xilinx Center of Excellence and the Co-Director of the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute. He has given a series of Keynote or Plenary speeches at various conferences. He is also included in the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent in 2008 and 2017 from UIUC.

Dr. Chen was involved in several startup companies. He implemented his published algorithm on CPLD technology mapping when he was a software engineer in Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. in 2001, and the software was exclusively licensed by Altera (now part of Intel) and distributed to many customers of Altera worldwide. He is one of the inventors of the xPilot High Level Synthesis package developed at UCLA, which was licensed to AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc. Aplus was acquired by Magma in 2003, and AutoESL was acquired by Xilinx in 2011. In 2016, he co-founded a new startup, Inspirit IoT, Inc.