Texas ECE PhD students Jiaqi Gu, Zheng Zhao, Chenghao Feng, and Mingjie Liu, along with professors David Z. Pan and Ray Chen received the Best Paper Award at the 25th ACM/IEEE Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC 2020) for their paper "Towards Area-Efficient Optical Neural Networks: An FFT-based Architecture." Jiaqi Gu, Zheng Zhao, and Mingjie Liu are advised by Dr. Pan, and Chenghao Feng is advised by Dr. Chen.
This was the 25th anniversary of ASP-DAC, and, in honor of the anniversary, ASP-DAC gave out Prolific Author Awards to authors who have published 25 papers or more at the conference. Dr. Pan was recognized for the 44 papers he has published at ASP-DAC, the third most of any author in ASP-DAC history.
Dr. Pan's research group, the UT Design Automation Laboratory (UTDA), has won 3 best paper awards at ASP-DAC, the most in ASP-DAC history (2010, 2012, and 2020). In addition, UTDA has four other Best Paper Award nominations (2006, 2008, 2013, 2020), and 2 finalists for the ASP-DAC 10-year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award (in 2015 and 2020, for papers published in 2005 and 2010, respectively).
Dr. Chen is the director of the Nanophotonics and Optical Interconnects Lab as well as the MURI Center for Energy-efficient Optical Interconnects and Computing sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR).