Publications

1. Real-Time Vessel Segmentation for Ultra-Sound Guided Surgery
   • Period: Feb 2024 - November 2024
   • Status: Published as second author in High Performance Extreme Computing (HPEC ‘24). Supervised by MIT-LL
   • Highlights:
     • Investigated various pruning/quantization techniques for real-time image segmentation of human vessels.
     • Contributed to writing a custom application for evaluating performance on a mobile AI system.
     • Motivated the processing of tomographic segmentation algorithms from a discrete computer to a mobile AI system in the next generation of AI Guide.
2. Large Reasoning Models for 3D Floorplanning in EDA
   • Period: Aug 2023 - Ongoing
   • Status: Under review, submitted as first author. Supervised by Qualcomm Fellowship and Prof. Franzon
   • Highlights:
     • Developed an auto-regressive decision-making model to enhance 3D IC floorplanning.
     • Implemented a new architecture integrating sequence-to-sequence reinforcement learning, improving reasoning over large discrete action spaces.
     • Achieved improvements in sample efficiency and floorplan quality through training with non-expert trajectories.
     • Conducted comprehensive evaluations demonstrating advanced performance in wirelength reduction and multi-objective optimization.
3. The Over-Certainty Phenomenon
   • Period: Sept 2022 – Ongoing
   • Status: Under review, submitted as first author, supervised by Prof. Jung-Eun Kim
   • Highlights:
     • Introduced a novel memory-efficient unsupervised domain adaptation algorithm (UDA) to improve calibration.
     • Identified key issues in state-of-the-art UDA algorithms that harm model calibration.
     • Retained comparable accuracy to SOTA.
4. Can Low-Rank Knowledge Distillation be Useful for Microelectronic Reasoning?
   • Period: March 2024 - May 2024
   • Status: Published as co-first author, LLM-Aided Design (LAD ‘24)
   • Highlights:
     • Presented empirical results on the feasibility of using offline LLMs in EDA.
     • Evaluated Llama-2-7B’s performance as a microelectronics Q&A expert.
     • Introduced a novel LLM adaptation technique, low-rank knowledge distillation (LoRA-KD).
     • Released an evaluation benchmark to support future research.
5. Optimal Brain Dissection
   • Period: May 2022 – Aug 2023
   • Status: Published as first author in BioInspired Processing (BIP ‘23), supervised by Sozzani Lab and USDA
   • Highlights:
     • Won Best Paper award.
     • Introduced a SOTA technique for feature-importance determination.
     • Developed the dense autoencoder, a new architecture for reducing reconstruction error in -omics data.
     • Outperformed the de facto gene regulatory network in explaining gene expressions.
6. DepthGraphNet
   • Period: Oct 2022 – July 2023
   • Status: Published as first author in Machine Learning for Computer Aided Design (MLCAD ‘23)
   • Highlights:
     • Investigated the use of siamese-graph neural networks for circuit graph isomorphism (CGI) detection.
     • Demonstrated logarithmic run-time complexity with respect to graph size.
     • Outperformed all other classical and neural methods in CGI detection accuracy.
     • Introduced theorems for the optimal architecture of GNNs for CGI detection.
7. Network Inference Approach for Phosphoproteomics
   • Period: May 2022 – Nov 2022
   • Status: Published as second author in Methods in Molecular Biology (MIMB vol. 2690), supervised by Sozzani Lab
   • Highlights:
     • Described methods to statistically analyze label-free phosphoproteomic data and infer post-transcriptional regulatory networks over time.
     • Used the Bayesian Dirichlet Equivalent Uniform to inference underlying latent relationships between variables.

Note: During my time at NC State, I wanted to enrich my knowledge beyond what I was learning in class and within Prof. Franzon’s lab. To do this, I joined two additional labs: the low-resource computing lab under Prof. Jung-Eun Kim in the CS department and Sozzani lab under Prof. Ross Sozzani in the Microbial Biology department. I concurrently produced research for all three labs while balancing my responsibilities as a student, junior advisor, teaching assistant, and research/grant proposal writer. I have manuscripts being prepared; contact me for details.