About

Cunxi is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the ECE Department at the University of Utah. Cunxi was a PostDoc Cornell University with Prof. Zhiru Zhang in 2018-2019, and was a PostDoc at Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI) at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, with Prof. Giovanni De Micheli in 2017-2018. He received Ph.D. degree from University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) in 2017, under the supervision of Prof. Maciej Ciesielski. His research interests focus on formal methods, electronic design automation, applied machine learning, formal verification, and hardware security. Cunxi spent 11 months as a research intern at IBM T.J Watson Research Center in 2015 and 2016. His work received the best paper nominations at ASP-DAC (2017), TCAD Best paper nomination (2018), and won the 1st place at DAC Security Contest (2017). Cunxi was nominated for ACM Outstanding Ph.D dissertation award by UMass. Cunxi served as Organizing Committee in IWLS, ICCD, VLSI-SoC, ASAP, as TPC member in ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, and panelist/reviewer for several funding agencies.

News (Past News)

• 10/2020 One paper accepted in MLCAD2020.
• 09/2020 One paper accepted in ASP-DAC'2021.
• 08/2020 Welcome new group memeberis Jiaqi Yin, Sam Culter, and Tara Zamani!
• 08/2020 Recieved Collabrative NSF Award NSF Formal Methods in the Field (FMitF) on advancing Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) and Deep Learning compilation (Role: Lead PI, co-PI: Dr. Zhiru Zhang).
• 07/2020 Two papers accepted at IWLS'20. One paper FlowTune accepted at ICCAD'20.
• 06/2020 Recieved NSF award (CCF-Core:SHF) on advancing Graph Learning and Formal Methods (Role: Sole PI).
• 06/2020 PhD students Yingjie Li and Qiwei Yuan both got accepted as DAC'20 Young Student Fellow. Congrats!

Tools

• Algebraic Combinational Equivalence Checking (ACEC) [Thesis Version] [New Version] [ACEC@ABC]

• Logic Decryption using Incremental SAT [Website] [Github]

• Formal Verification of GF(2^n) Arithmetic [Website]

• ML-assisted Synthesis System -- FlowGen[Github], FlowTune (w end-to-end FPGA/ASIC support) [Github] [Talk@Youtube]

Research Employments

Assistant Profesor, ECE Dept., University of Utah (08/2019 - present)

Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell University (09/2018 - 08/2019 )

Postdoctoral Researcher, EPFL | École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland (08/2017 - 08/2018 )

Research Assistant, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, VLSI CAD Laboratory (01/2014 - 07/2017)

Research Intern, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Height, New York, USA (05/2016 - 11/2016 & 05/2015 - 09/2015)

 

People

PhD Students: Qiwei Yuan (Sp'20 - ), Yingjie Li (Sp'20 - ), Jiaqi Yin, (Sp'21 - )

MS Student: Sam Culter

BS Student: Tara Zamani

 

Education

• Ph.D. Computer System Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 09. 2013 - 04. 2017

  Thesis: Formal Analysis of Arithmetic Circuits using Computer Algebra - Verification, Abstraction, and Reverse Engineering

• B.S. ECE, Zhejiang University City College. 09. 2009 - 06. 2013

 

Professional Service

• Organizing Committee: ASAP'19, IWLS'20, ICCD'20, VLSI-SoC'20

• TPC Member: IWLS'17, IWLS'18, IWLS'19, DUHDe@DATE'19, ASP-DAC'20, ICCAD'20, ASP-DAC'21

• Funding Review/Panelist: NSF-CNS'20

• Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on VLSI, IEEE Design&Test, IEEE Transactions on CAD, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Embedded System Letter

Conference Reviewer: VTS'15, ICCAD'15, CHES'16, DAC'17, DAC'18, ASPDAC'19, FPGA'19