Shobha Vasudevan

Google Faculty Research Award 2019

Shobha wins 2019 Google Faculty Research Award. The award is for the reliability of large scale distributed systems. More details can be found here and here.

Invited talk at Facebook Virtual Reality Labs

Talk on GoldMine and beyond: Scaling verification with machine learning. Great questions and discussions.

Best paper nomination at ASP-DAC 2019

Our paper, “A Figure of Merit for Assertions in Verification” was one of the nominated papers for the best paper award at ASP-DAC 2019. The paper presents computable metrics to find the goodness of human written and machine-generated assertions. The paper attempts to answer the question of how good the specification of a system is. Assertion quality metrics can be used for design understanding, coverage analysis and debugging. The tool for assertion metrics is available for download here.

Invited tutorial at VLSI Design 2019

Shobha gave an invited half day tutorial on DUPLEX, our optimization tool. The talk had new results from applying DUPLEX to computer vision and perception problems. DUPLEX works better than gradient descent in our preliminary results. Great audience- gave ideas for lots of new applications for DUPLEX!

Women In STEM forum

Prof Vasudevan was a panelist for a women in engineering forum to discuss increased participation of girls and women in STEM fields in India. The event saw a participation of more than 300 people. Encouraging. The panel was on women retaining their jobs, given the sharp drops observed mid-career.

Machine learning applications book chapter by Shobha

Machine learning and AI has made its way into manufacturing and electronic design automation in a big way. Watch out for Prof. Vasudevan’s new chapter in the book on ML4CAD by Springer , due to be published in Spring 2019. Thanks to editors Ibrahim Elfadel, Duane Boning and Xin Li for putting together a timely topic.

New kind of error out to get us in our cars!

We uncovered a new class of soft errors caused by electrostatic discharge. We fabricated a test chip and measured corruptions in apps and programs running on the chip when a physical ESD gun shoots at the chip. We find that these are particularly prevalent and widespread in automotive environments. The biggest threat from these errors is to microcontrollers in ESD rich zones like highly autonomous vehicles. An error in our cars could have serious consequences.

Watch out for our forthcoming paper in DATE 2019, Guilty As Charged: Computational Reliability Threats Posed By Electrostatic Discharge-induced Soft Errors.

Talk at Haifa Verification and Privacy Conference

Prof. Vasudevan gave an invited talk at the Haifa ViPs conference, a new incarnation of the Haifa Verification Conference (HVC). Quality of invited talks was excellent. As was the audience. Thanks to IBM for the invitation!

Best paper nomination at DAC 2018

The apps you use can shape how bug free your phone is! Our paper Application-level hardware tracing for scaling post-silicon debug by Debjit Pal and Vasudevan was nominated for a best paper award at DAC 2018. This presents an approach to analyze SoC hardware for mobile devices using formal modeling of app-level information. The paper was the result of a long and productive collaboration with both Intel and IBM. The app-level analysis scaled up the silicon debug to a large, real life SoC as opposed to small benchmarks. We want everyone to use it, so we put it here.