Yiran Chen

Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Yiran Chen received B.S (1998) and M.S. (2001) from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. (2005) from Purdue University. After five years in the industry, he joined the University of Pittsburgh in 2010 as Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2014, holding Bicentennial Alumni Faculty Fellow. He is now the Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University and serving as the director of the NSF AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging the Next-generation Networks (Athena), the NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing (ASIC), and the co-director of Duke Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence (DCEI). His group focuses on the research of new memory and storage systems, machine learning and neuromorphic computing, and mobile computing systems. Dr. Chen has published 1 book and about 500 technical publications and has been granted 96 US patents. He has served as the associate editor of more than a dozen international academic periodicals and served on the technical and organization committees of more than 60 international conferences. He is now serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine. He received eight best paper awards, one best poster award, and sixteen best paper nominations from reputable international conferences and workshops such as MICRO, KDD, DATE, SEC, etc. He received numerous awards for his technical contributions and professional services such as the IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, ACM SIGDA Service Award, etc. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE and now serves as the chair of ACM SIGDA.

Appointments and Affiliations

  • Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Contact Information

Education

  • Ph.D. Purdue University, 2005

Research Interests

Emerging memory and storage technologies

Embedded systems, CPS, edge computing, and mobile applications

Neuromorphic computing, deep learning and system security

Low power circuit and system

Awards, Honors, and Distinctions

  • Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 2022
  • ACM Fellow. ACM. 2020
  • IEEE Fellow. IEEE. 2018

Courses Taught

  • COMPSCI 393: Research Independent Study
  • ECE 590: Advanced Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • ECE 661: Computer Engineering Machine Learning and Deep Neural Nets
  • ECE 891: Internship
  • ECE 899: Special Readings in Electrical Engineering

In the News

Representative Publications

  • Xie, Z., R. Liang, X. Xu, J. Hu, C. C. Chang, J. Pan, and Y. Chen. “Preplacement Net Length and Timing Estimation by Customized Graph Neural Network.” Ieee Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems 41, no. 11 (November 1, 2022): 4667–80. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2022.3149977.
  • Chen, Y., and Q. Qiu. “Guest Editorial: IEEE TC Special Issue on Software, Hardware and Applications for Neuromorphic Computing.” Ieee Transactions on Computers 71, no. 11 (November 1, 2022): 2705–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2022.3208389.
  • Wang, C., D. Feng, W. Tong, J. Liu, B. Wu, and Y. Chen. “Space-Time-Efficient Modeling of Large-Scale 3-D Cross-Point Memory Arrays by Operation Adaption and Network Compaction.” Ieee Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems 41, no. 10 (October 1, 2022): 3479–91. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2021.3123591.
  • Zhang, J., J. Tang, Y. Chen, J. Liu, J. Ye, M. Wolf, V. Narayanan, M. Srivastava, M. I. Jordan, and V. Bahl. “The 5th Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) Workshop.” In Proceedings of the Acm Sigkdd International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 4912–13, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3534678.3542911.
  • Li, Z., Q. Zheng, B. Yan, R. Huang, B. Li, and Y. Chen. “ASTERS: Adaptable Threshold Spike-timing Neuromorphic Design with Twin-Column ReRAM Synapses.” In Proceedings  Design Automation Conference, 1099–1104, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3489517.3530591.