EECS Colloquium: Software developer tools for democrotizing heterogeneous computing — Qian Zhang, UCLA

About the event

Abstract:
Emerging hardware, like FPGAs, is shaping the future of heterogeneous computing; however, the use of such extraordinary computing power is restricted to a few software developers with hardware expertise. My research invents software developer tools to democratize heterogeneous computing with FPGAs. This talk includes my research on: (1) fuzz testing for revealing platform-dependent behavior; (2) automated code refactoring for FPGA optimization; and (3) program transpilation with test generation and program repair. This line of research, to our knowledge, is the first attempt to expand the reach of software engineering techniques to the hardware design domain.

Bio:
Qian Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research belongs to the interdisciplinary area of Software Engineering for Data and Compute Intensive Systems. Her postdoc work has been published at ESEC/FSE, ICSE, ASE, and ASPLOS. Before UCLA, she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her Ph.D. work produced 12 research papers in top-tier conferences and journals, including DAC, ICCAD, DATE, and TCAD. She was the recipient of the Distinguished Academic Performance Scholarship in Hong Kong and has also been selected as one of the MIT EECS Rising Stars in 2021.