A Year in Review
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A Year in Review Electrical Engineering & Computer Science UNIVERSITY of MICHIGAN Mcity, where autonomous cars are tested, at sunrise. Read about May Mobility, an autonomous vehicle startup, on page 35. EDITORS: STORY AND PHOTO CONTRIBUTORS: Catharine June Stephen Alvey Gyouho Kim Steven Crang Gabe Cherry Kate McAlpine Faqrul A. Chowdhury Dan Meisler ASSISTANT EDITORS: Robert Coelius Nicole Casal Moore Zach Champion Evan Dougherty Rodrigo Sabadini Dan Newman Danielle Hicks U-M Grid Rose Anderson Darren Hood Joseph Xu Electrical and Computer Engineering Electrical Engineering and GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Computer Science Building Rose Anderson 1301 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2122 The Regents of the University of Michigan Computer Science and Engineering Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park A Non-discriminatory, Bob and Betty Beyster Building Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor Affirmative Action Employer. Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor © 2018 2260 Hayward Street Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Mark S. Schlissel (ex officio) Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121 Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor 2 CONTENTS Research Briefs 5 Student News 68 TECH TRANSFER 35 Honors and Awards 80 Doctorates 85 Department News 39 Alumni News 88 Diversity 44 Alumni Spotlights 88 Outreach 47 Alumni Briefs 95 New Books 49 Alumni Events 96 New Courses 50 Faculty News 54 New Faculty 54 Faculty Honors, Awards, and Activities 57 CSE Advisory Board and ECE Council 97 Donor News 98 In Memorium 102 EECS Faculty 106 3 Message from thE Mingyan Liu, Chair Brian Noble, Chair ChairS Electrical and Computer Computer Science Engineering and Engineering Dear Friends, Change is in the air! And ideas so transformative they are being funded under a In the space of two years, our department has welcomed College of Engineering Blue Sky Initiative give the promise new leadership for both divisions. Brian Noble has of clean hydrogen fuel and accessible clean water. completed his first year as Chair of Computer Science and This year, we highlighted the faculty who are currently, Engineering, and Mingyan Liu has assumed the mantle as or have recently been, the key organizers of professional the Peter and Evelyn Fuss Chair of Electrical and Computer conferences, symposiums, and workshops. We appreciate Engineering, effective September 1, 2018. Liu succeeds the leadership, spirit of service, and appreciation for Khalil Najafi, who became the department’s first ECE collaboration that it takes to commit to such a time- Chair in 2008. intensive activity. And we’re particularly delighted to see Since 2008, the department has been led by co-chairs of that seven of these events brought our colleagues to Ann each division, rather than a single chair. At Michigan, we Arbor. feel that this gives us the best of both worlds: independence Check out some of the new courses and programs we’re to set our own priorities, and the foundation of a large offering to students, including a drone class for freshman, leading EECS department. a data science class open to the entire University, and a We hope that this joint publication gives you an insight into multidisciplinary master’s program in data science. just how broad our interests have become. We hope you appreciate the effort all of our students spend EECS has several new major research initiatives taking on on their studies, as well as the extra effort that many expend the next era of computing, including the $32M Applications on interdisciplinary teams and groups. These students Driving Architectures Center, which aims to develop a lend their valuable skills, energy, and enthusiasm to team modular hardware and software infrastructure that will competitions, service work around the world, and solving democratize development, and over $16.7M spread over public problems. several projects working to push the development of We wish we could include the full-length stories of our microprocessors beyond the limits of Moore’s Law. research, student activities, and alumni spotlights. They can Continued breakthroughs have been made just over the all be found on our website if you’d like to learn more. past year in the efficiency of solar cells, making them And finally – to our faithful alumni and friends who more competitive in the marketplace. Our robots are support all of our many activities, from research to student walking, climbing, flying, and riding Segways. Security trips abroad, thank you! We appreciate your support more researchers continue to look for solutions that will secure than we can say. our transportation, energy, and electoral infrastructure. 4 4 TEXT RESEARCH5 BRIEFS Reimagining How Computers Are Designed University of Michigan Prof. Valeria Bertacco, Leads $32M Center Director of the ADA Center. As the computing industry struggles to ADA aims to democratize the develop- optimized for image search or data maintain its historically rapid pace of ment and deployment of advanced analytics – as a promising approach. But innovation, a new, $32M center based computing systems by developing a the biggest industrial customized silicon at the University of Michigan aims to modular approach to system hardware successes to date, such as smartphone streamline and democratize the design and software design, where applications’ systems-on-a-chip or graphics process- and manufacture of next-generation internal algorithms are mapped to highly ing units, have required the immense computing systems. efficient and reusable accelerated hard- resources of large, deeply integrated, ware components. This faster and more vertical design teams. ADA’s goal is to The Center for Applications Driving effective approach will require that the change that. The center is organized into Architectures, or ADA, will develop entire design framework – from system three themes: a transformative, “plug-and-play” software, to architecture, to design tools ecosystem to encourage a flood of Agile system development, which will – be reimagined and rebuilt. fresh ideas in computing frontiers such identify patterns in the core algorithms as autonomous control, robotics, and of emerging applications and map those machine-learning. algorithms to new, tailored computational Five years from now, I’d like blocks. Today, analysts worry that the industry is stagnating, caught between physical to see freshly minted college Algorithms-driven architectures, which limits to the size of silicon transistors and will develop reusable, highly efficient the skyrocketing costs and complexity of grads doing hardware algorithmic hardware accelerators for the system design. startups. computational blocks. “The electronic industry is facing many , which — Valeria Bertacco Technology-driven systems challenges going forward, and we stand will include the development of an a much better chance of solving these open-source chip scaffold for these problems if we can make hardware new, accelerator-centric systems. The “You shouldn’t need a PhD to design design more accessible to a large pool of scaffolds would include all the necessary new computing systems,” Bertacco talent,” said Prof. Valeria Bertacco, direc- support subsystems – such as general- said. “Five years from now, I’d like to tor of the ADA Center. purpose cores, on-chip communication see freshly minted college grads doing fabric, and memories – to facilitate a The center is a five-year project that is hardware startups.” “plug-and-play” flow so that a designer led by U-M and includes researchers Researchers are looking for creative will no longer need to send a design to a from a total of seven universities, approaches to extend the utility of fab and wait for a chip to come back. including Cornell, Harvard, MIT, traditional silicon beyond the Moore’s Stanford, Princeton, the University of Law era, a long-standing but waning Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the trend in which chips become cheaper to University of Washington. It is funded manufacture, and more powerful, each by a consortium that is led by the year. Semiconductor Research Corporation and includes the Defense Advanced ADA researchers see customized silicon Research Projects Agency. for specific applications – like chips 5 RESEARCH BRIEFS Designing the Unhackable Computer By turning computer circuits into unsolvable puzzles, a attackers to read the passwords and other critical information on University of Michigan team aims to create an unhackable machines. computer with a $3.6M grant from the Defense Advanced More than 40% of the “software doors” that hackers have avail- Research Projects Agency. able to them today would be closed if researchers could elimi- Prof. Todd Austin leads the project, called Morpheus. Its cyber- nate seven classes of hardware weaknesses, DARPA says. The security approach is dramatically different from today’s, which hardware weakness classes have been identified by a relies on software – specifically soft- crowd-source listing of security ware patches to vulnerabilities that vulnerabilities called the Com- have already been identified. That’s mon Weakness Enumeration. been called the “patch and pray” The classes are: permissions and model, and it’s not ideal. privileges, buffer errors, resource management, information leakage, Morpheus outlines a new way to numeric errors, cryptographic design hardware so that information errors, and code injection. is rapidly and randomly moved and destroyed. By doing so, the DARPA is aiming to render these technology works to divert the attacks impossible within five attacker from the critical information years. If developed, Morpheus they need to construct a successful could meet this requirement, Austin attack. said. In this way, Morpheus could protect While the complexity required against future threats that have yet might sound expensive, Austin to be identified. Under the Morpheus approach, information is rapidly and says he’s confident his team can randomly moved, creating a puzzle to thwart attackers. make it possible at low cost. “What’s incredibly exciting about the project is that it will fix tomorrow’s vul- Also on the project team are nerabilities,” Austin said. “I’ve never known any security system Thurnau Prof.