Adou Sangbone Assoa has received the Cadence 2020 Black Students in Technology Scholarship. A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Assoa works in the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab. He is advised by ECE Professor Arijit Raychowdhury.

Assoa’s current research involves exploration of circuit and hardware topologies that can implement combinatorial optimizations through a natural embedding of the Spin Glass model, which is derived from condensed matter physics. Generalizations of the Ising model, including the Edwards-Anderson and Sherrington-Kirkpatrick models, can be used to model spin glasses. Their dynamics are currently being studied for effective implementations of physical annealing, where the ground state naturally encodes the solution of combinatorial problems. Assoa is currently studying the system dynamics, as well as hardware implementations of such systems, to enable more efficient solvers for computationally hard problems.  

Prior to coming to Georgia Tech, Assoa graduated with his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities in 2019. He joined the School of ECE during fall 2020.