Best Paper Honor for EECS Professor
June 22, 2015 -- Mohammad Al Faruque, electrical engineering and computer science assistant professor, and his doctoral student Kourosh Vatanparvar were recognized with the best paper award at this month’s IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference. Held this year in San Francisco, the oldest and most prestigious conference in the field of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) and computer-aided design (CAD) received more than 800 submissions, from which only 162 papers were accepted.
Six of those 162 were nominated for the best paper award. Al Faruque and Vatanparvar’s paper, “Battery Lifetime-Aware Automotive Climate Control for Electric Vehicles,” was one of only two chosen.
“Having served on the awards committee in the past, I know that these papers go through a rigorous selection process involving additional rounds of review, panel discussion, and attendance and evaluation of the oral presentations at the conference,” said EECS professor Fadi Kurdahi, director of UCI’s Center for Embedded and Cyber-physical Systems, with which Al Faruque is also affiliated.
Kurdahi said Al Faruque is the first UCI faculty member to have received this prestigious award. In addition, he is one of very few researchers worldwide to have won that in combination with a best paper award from the International Conference on Computer‑Aided Design, another respected CAD conference.
“This recognition is very important for me because DAC is the premier conference in the area of VLSI/CAD, and they have valued our work on design automation of electric vehicles that we had been working on in our lab for the last couple of years,” Al Faruque said.
“Our methodology will significantly improve the battery life of an electric vehicle and reduce the need for expensive battery replacement costs,” he added.
Al Faruque also was recognized last month at UCI’s Undergraduate Research Symposium with the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research. One faculty member each year receives the award, granted since 1997, in recognition of “meritorious contributions in support of undergraduate research.”
-- Anna Lynn Spitzer
