UCI Engineering Student Wins International Embedded Systems Competition

Oct.31, 2023 - Valen Yamamoto, a computer science engineering major who recently graduated, placed first in the undergraduate division of the Association for Computing Machinery SIGBED Student Research Competition in September. The annual event focuses on embedded systems and attracts student researchers from all over the world. Yamamoto presented her contributions to the development of a neural network tool called BERN-NN at this year’s competition in Hamburg, Germany.

Under the advisement of Yasser Shoukry, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Yamamoto worked to develop the algorithm and improve the runtime on a tool that provides tighter estimations on the range of neural network outputs than other tools by using nonlinear approximations. Specifically, she reduced the amount of time for the tool to process from hours to seconds by creating data structures and algorithms that can run on multiple graphics processing units (GPU) at one time.

“The real-world implications of this research drew me to it,” said Yamamoto, who plans to apply to graduate school and continue researching control systems. “Neural networks are being used to test the safety of applications like self-driving cars so tools like ours could be used in the future during a neural network’s training to steer it toward creating a safe model.”

– Lilith Christopher