UCLA VAST Lab would like to congratulate its former member Prof. Deming Chen (advised by Prof. Jason Cong) for being elected to ACM Fellow.  Deming received his PhD in 2005, he is currently the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a globally recognized leader in reconfigurable computing and…
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Congratulations to PhD students Jiahao Zhang and Zifan He supervised by Professor Jason Cong for winning the Adaptive Computing category of the 2025 AMD Open Hardware competition with their project “FPGA-Optimized Large Language Model Inference: High-Speed and Accurate Design with SpinQuant.” This work utilizes the FlexLLM framework, a composable High-Level Synthesis (HLS) library for rapidly…
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Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong and his co-authors, Chen Zhang, Zhenman Fang, Peipei Zhou, Peichen Pan for receiving the ICCAD 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award for the paper titled “Caffeine: Towards uniformed representation and acceleration for deep convolutional neural networks” presented at the 2016 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD). The award was presented at…
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Prof. Jason Cong gave a keynote speech and the ACM Breakthrough Lecture at KDD’2025 on August 5, 2025 in Toronto, Canada.  His talk, titled “Deep Learning Meets Chip Design: Driving Next-Gen Efficiency and Innovation”, discussed the opportunities and progress for AI models and hardware accelerator co-design towards the goal of efficient general intelligence (EGI).  It…
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Prof. Jason Cong delivered his keynote speech entitled “Democratize Chip Design” at the 62nd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) on June 25, 2025.  Cong presented a grand vision of enabling software programmers for chip designs, and highlighted recent progress at UCLA (in collaboration with Prof. Yizhou Sun’s group) towards this goal, integrating deep learning, mathematical…
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Zijian Ding is a second year PhD student whose research focuses on advancing AI/ML for hardware design, including software-to-HLS transformation, foundation models for performance prediction, and efficient design optimization. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees. 

Congratulations to Zifan He for receiving the annual AMD Heterogeneous Accelerated Computing award.  He is a second year PhD student working on  algorithm-hardware co-design to enable efficient and high-quality inference of LLMs.  His research includes (1) Efficient Language Processing with Unlimited Context Length:  Zifan developed the Hierarchical Memory Transformer (HMT), a framework designed to improve memory efficiency…
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Wan-Hsuan Lin’s research focuses on building scalable tools and algorithms that translate quantum programs into instructions executable on real quantum hardware. With 7 publications in top design automation venues, she has made significant contributions to improving the scalability and efficiency of quantum compilers. Pushing the Limit for the Compilation Scalability: As quantum chips increase in…
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Prof. Jason Cong received the UIUC Grainger College of Engineering Alumni Award for Distinguished Service “for impactful research and entrepreneurial work on electronic design automation, quantum and customized computing, FPGA, and highly scalable algorithms.”  The other six awardees include a university president, an US Air Force Major General, and highly successful industry leaders and entrepreneurs…
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ACM announcement states that they have named Jason Cong, the holder of the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, as the recipient of the 2024 ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. Cong is recognized for fundamental contributions to the design and automation of field-programmable systems and customizable computing….
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