Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. candidate Zishen Wan has won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition (SRC). As the champion, Wan will represent the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIGBED) in the 2023 ACM SRC Grand Finals.

The ACM SRC is the main research competition for students to present their original research at well-known ACM sponsored conferences. There are two rounds of competition, and the panel of judges and attendees review the works based on scientific novelty, practical impact, and presentation. ACM SIGBED specifically focuses on the real-time, embedded, and cyber-physical systems community.

Wan is being recognized for his innovation in hardware and systems for autonomous machine computing that advances performance, efficiency, resilience, and robustness. His general research interests include computer architecture and VLSI, with a focus on building efficient and reliable hardware and systems for next-generation autonomous machines (such as robots, drones, and unmanned vehicles) through algorithm-hardware co-design and emerging memory technologies.

He is a member of the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab, led by ECE Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor Arijit Raychowdhury. Wan received his M.S. from Harvard University advised by Professor Vijay Janapa Reddi, and B.S. from Harbin Institute of Technology, both in electrical engineering.

Through his academic work, Wan has also received the Qualcomm Fellowship in 2022, the CRNCH Ph.D. Fellowship in 2022, the Best Paper Award from the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 2020, and the Best Paper Award in IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL) in 2020.

All grand finalists, together with their supervisors, are invited to the Annual ACM Awards Banquet to be held in 2023.