Chair News

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We are pleased to welcome Mees Frensel as the newest member of the CC Chair! Mees completed his master’s degree in Computer Engineering at TU Delft in 2024. His thesis, supervised by Prof. Zaid Al-Ars, focused on efficient, high-throughput nanopore DNA base-calling. He used model compression techniques, such as pruning, to reduce the size of an LSTM-based deep learning model without compromising accuracy. With expertise in DNA sequence analysis pipelines, Mees will be working on the genomICs project, led by Asif Khan, that aims to accelerate sequence analysis pipelines using emerging near-memory and in-memory computing architectures. We are excited to have Mees on board and look forward to working with him!

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The CC Chair was quite busy during the Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek) 2024, held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, in the first week of October. On Sunday, Joao talked about emerging main memory simulation in the tutorial “Disruptive Memory Technologies: A Tutorial and Unified Simulation Framework” organised by Jian-Jia Chen, Joerg Henkel and Lokesh Siddhu. The simulation infrastructure code is publicly available. As program co-chair of the International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES), Prof. Castrillon had the privilege of presenting several awards during the ESWeek (test of time awards and best paper award). On Tuesday, Prof. Castrillon participated in the panel “The Embedded Systems and the Environmental Crisis” organised by Prof. Alex K. Jones and co-panelists Peipei Zhou, Steve Jackson, Daniel Andresen, and Sudeep Pasricha. CASES, and its sister conferences EMSOFT and CODES-ISSS, were a great success, with lively discussions during and between sessions. After closing the conferences, speakers and organisers of the workshop “Time-Centric Reactive Software (TCRS)” met for dinner at a typical BBQ restaurant. The TCRS workshop, co-organized by Prof. Hokeun Kim and Prof. Castrillon, had several interesting talks, including a paper by Shaokhai Lin on “Navigating Time and Energy Trade-offs in Reactive Heterogeneous Systems” and several other members of the CC Chair. 

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Jiahong Bi represented the CC Chair at the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) Summer School Workshop 2024, which was held on September 16 2024 in Alghero, Italy. He presented the paper titled "Leveraging the MLIR infrastructure for the computing continuum", describing work in progress in the context of the MYRTUS EU project. In the talk and the later discussions during the poster session, Jiahong showed the current status and future improvement of the compilation framework in MYRTUS including extensions to his Master Thesis. The workshop also provided a great opportunity for networking and brainstorming in a beautiful city by the sea, which he benefited a lot across different technical topics concerning CPS.

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Julian Robledo represented the CC Chair at the Forum on specification & Design Languages (FDL) 2024, which was held from 4 to 6 September in Stockholm, Sweden. He presented our article titled "Timeline decoupling for performance in Lingua Franca". Lingua Franca is a programming framework that has gained the interest of the research community because of its deterministic and reactive nature. This presentation described a methodology to increase parallel execution of programs in Lingua Franca by decoupling timeline of components through partitions called timing enclaves. FDL provided a cozy atmosphere perfect for networking and exchanging ideas. Moreover, the social event organised at the Vasa Museum, the house of an entirely intact warship from the 17th century, was an inspiring location for exciting discussions about technical and non so technical topics.

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Prof. Castrillon deliver a talk on “High-level programming abstractions and compilation for near and in-memory computing” at the 2nd Minisymposium on Applications and Benefits of UPMEM commercial Massively Parallel Processing- In-Memory Platform (ABUMPIMP 2024) which was co-located with this year’s International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par 2024). In the talk, Jeronimo talked about high-level abstractions and compilation using MLIR, with focus on recent work on compilers for UPMEM and memristive crossbars (CINM), compilers for CAM-based accelerators (C4CAM) and compilers for logic-in-memory (Sherlock). The presentations touched upon projects results from EVEREST, the SPP2377 and SCADS.AI among others.

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Prof. Castrillon and João Paulo de Lima represented the CC Chair at the 61st Design Automation Conference (DAC'24), held from June 23rd to 27th in San Francisco, California. João presented collaborative research with Prof. Mehdi Tahoori and his group at the CDNC/KIT on "SHERLOCK: Scheduling Efficient and Reliable Bulk Bitwise Operations in NVMs" through a 15-minute talk and a poster session. SHERLOCK is a novel retargetable mapping and scheduling tool designed for the efficient execution of bulk bitwise operations in non-volatile memories such as RRAM and STT-MRAM. The tool addresses a significant limitation in current logic-based Computing-in-Memory, which is typically restricted to SIMD parallelism, by providing greater flexibility to explore more forms of parallelism. Additionally, João participated in the DAC PhD Forum, presenting a poster titled "Architecture Optimization and Design Tools for CAM-based Accelerators". His poster highlighted work carried out at both UFRGS (BR) with Prof. Luigi Carro and TU Dresden over the past 5 years.

DAC'24 drew over 5,000 attendees and allowed us to meet and exchange thoughts with other researchers and designers in the ecosystem.

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Marcus Rossel represented the CC Chair at the EGRAPHS workshop as part of PLDI, a premier forum on Programming Language Design and Implementation, which was held from 24. to 28. June in Copenhagen, Denmark. He presented joint work with Andrés Goens from the University of Amsterdam, also a former CC member, on "Bridging Syntax and Semantics of Lean Expressions in E-Graphs". This presentation describes Marcus' work on his M.Sc. thesis at the CC Chair, in which he uses the egg e-graphs library to find and build formal proofs in the Lean theorem prover. His presentations was well-attended and inspired and instilled interesting discussions afterwards.

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We congratulate Christian Menard for having successfully defended his PhD on April 25th, 2024 on "Deterministic Reactive Programming for Cyber-physical Systems”. Christian spent several fruitful years with us, starting with his Diploma Thesis for which he received the Hermann-Willkomm in 2016. He worked on several programming models for parallel and distributed computing, leading to upwards of 20 international publications. In the past 4 years he led the development of the Lingua Franca project on the side of TU Dresden. A successful collaboration with the UC Berkeley and several other academic partners worldwide. Special thanks to Prof. Stephen Edwards from Columbia University for acting as external reviewer. Christian will move on to lead Xronos, a company that develops tools and services for building software-defined cyber-physical systems that span deeply embedded, edge, and cloud platforms. We wish Christian all the best and hope to keep in touch! 

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As has become a tradition, the CC chair participated in the REWE Team Challenge, a 5K run through downtown Dresden. This year, our chair was represented by three mixed teams: Com(e)-pile-run, consisting Clément Fournier, Conny Okuma, Julian Robledo Mejia, and Jerónimo Castrillón; Byte me if you can, featuring Christian Menard, João Paulo Cardoso de Lima, Nesrine Khouzami, and Robert Khasanov; and Caffeine Circuits, a joint CC-PD team with Maryam Eslami, Siddharth Gupta, Steffen Märcker, and Tassilo Tanneberger. This year, we started our team training sessions earlier than in the previous years. Thanks to these sessions, many of us significantly improved our personal records! We are already looking forward to the next year's competition!

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We welcome Guilherme (again) to the CCC team! Guilherme had spent 8 months with us in 2022-2023 prior to finishing his PhD in Computer Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Antonio Carlos Beck. Guilherme’s research has focused on accelerating machine learning applications on FPGAs in edge computing. At the CC chair, Guilherme will continue to research methods to optimise applications in the computing continuum. We are extremely happy to have Guilherme back in the team!