Yiran Chen

Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Yiran Chen received B.S and M.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2005. After five years in industry, he joined University of Pittsburgh in 2010 as Assistant Professor and then promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2014, held Bicentennial Alumni Faculty Fellow. He now is a tenured Associate Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University and serving as the director of NSF Industry–University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing (ASIC) and co-director of Duke Center for Evolutionary Intelligence (CEI), focusing on the research of new memory and storage systems, machine learning and neuromorphic computing, and mobile computing systems. Dr. Chen has published one book and more than 350 technical publications and has been granted 93 US patents. He serves or served the associate editor of several IEEE and ACM transactions/journals and served on the technical and organization committees of more than 50 international conferences. He received 6 best paper awards and 12 best paper nominations from international conferences. He is the recipient of NSF CAREER award and ACM SIGDA outstanding new faculty award. He is the Fellow of IEEE and Distinguished Member of ACM, a distinguished lecturer of IEEE CEDA, and the recipient of the Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.

Appointments and Affiliations

• Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Professor of Computer Science

Contact Information

• Office Location: 130 Hudson Hall, 100 Science Drive, Durham, NC 27519
• Office Phone: (919) 660-1372
• Email Address: yiran.chen@duke.edu
• Websites:
  • Duke University Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence
  • NSF IUCRC for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing

Education

• Ph.D. Purdue University, 2005

Research Interests

Nonvolatile memory and storage systems, neuromorphic computing, and mobile applications.

Awards, Honors, and Distinctions

• IEEE Fellow. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 2018

Courses Taught

• COMPSCI 350L: Digital Systems
• COMPSCI 391: Independent Study
• ECE 350L: Digital Systems
• ECE 392: Projects in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• ECE 550D: Fundamentals of Computer Systems and Engineering
• ECE 590: Advanced Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• ECE 891: Internship
• ECE 899: Special Readings in Electrical Engineering

In the News

• Yiran Chen: Integrating Tomorrows Technology into Todays Devices (Jan 3, 2017)

Representative Publications

• Xu, J; Feng, D; Hua, Y; Tong, W; Liu, J; Li, C; Xu, G; Chen, Y, Adaptive granularity encoding for energy-efficient non-volatile main memory, Proceedings Design Automation Conference (2019) [10.1145/3316781.3317760] [abs].
• Liu, R; Yang, J; Chen, Y; Zhao, W, ESLAM: An energy-efficient accelerator for real-time ORB-SLAM on FPGA platform, Proceedings Design Automation Conference (2019) [10.1145/3316781.3317820] [abs].
• Mao, J; Yang, Q; Li, A; Li, H; Chen, Y, MobiEye: An efficient cloud-based video detection system for real-time mobile applications, Proceedings Design Automation Conference (2019) [10.1145/3316781.3317865] [abs].
• Yan, B; Yang, Q; Chen, WH; Chang, KT; Su, JW; Hsu, CH; Li, SH; Lee, HY; Sheu, SS; Ho, MS; Wu, Q; Chang, MF; Chen, Y; Li, H, RRAM-based Spiking Nonvolatile Computing-In-Memory Processing Engine with Precision-Configurable in Situ Nonlinear Activation, Digest of Technical Papers Symposium on Vlsi Technology, vol 2019-June (2019), pp. T86-T87 [10.23919/VLSIT.2019.8776485] [abs].
• Zhang, J; Wen, W; Deisher, M; Cheng, HP; Li, H; Chen, Y, Learning Efficient Sparse Structures in Speech Recognition, 2015 Ieee International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (Icassp), vol 2019-May (2019), pp. 2717-2721 [10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8683620] [abs].