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David Atienza Alonso

Nationality: Spanish and Swiss

EPFL STI IEM ESL
ELG 130 (Bâtiment ELG)
Station 11
1015 Lausanne

Expertise

Internet of Things (IoT) and edge AI computing architectures design, embedded systems design, 2D/3D thermal modeling and management for multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoc), electronic design automation (EDA), smart wearables and medical systems, wireless body sensor networks (WBSN) and smart wearables, memory optimizations, low-power hardware and software co-design, embedded machine learning.

Mission

As head of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) the mission is the definition of system-level multi-objective design methods, optimization methodologies and tools for high-performance edge AI and embedded systems, as well as nano-scale Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures targeting the Internet-of-Things (IoT) Era.

The main research lines within the ESL activities include, but are not restricted to, Circuits, Architectures and systems, Algorithms and Applications.

Expertise

Internet of Things (IoT) and edge AI computing architectures design, embedded systems design, 2D/3D thermal modeling and management for multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoc), electronic design automation (EDA), smart wearables and medical devices, wireless body sensor networks (WBSN), memory optimizations, low-power hardware and software co-design, embedded machine learning.
David Atienza Alonso is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Head of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) and Associate Vice President of Research Centers and Platforms at EPFL, Switzerland. Previously, he was the Scientific and Executive Director of the EcoCloud Sustainable Computing Center of EPFL from 2021 to 2024. He received his MSc and Ph.D. degrees in computer science and engineering from UCM, Spain, and IMEC, Belgium, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. His research interests include system-level design methodologies for high-performance multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) and low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems, including new 2-D/3-D thermal-aware design for MPSoCs and many-core servers, ultra-low power edge AI architectures for wireless body sensor nodes and smart embedded systems, HW/SW reconfigurable systems, dynamic memory optimizations, and network-on-chip design.
Dr. Atienza has co-authored more than 450 papers, three books, and 14 licensed patents in these previous areas. He has also received several recognitions and awards, among them, the ICCAD 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award in 2020, Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, the IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He has also earned several best paper awards at top conferences in the areas of electronic design automation (EDA), embedded and cyber-physical systems, and medical devices. He serves or has served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Trans. on CAD (T-CAD), and as associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Computers (TC), IEEE
Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), IEEE Design & Test of Computers (D&T), IEEE T-CAD, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing (T-SUSC), ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC), ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), and Elsevier Integration. He was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. He served as President of IEEE CEDA in the period 2018-2019, and is currently the Chair of the European Design Automation Association (EDAA). He is a Fellow of IEEE and of ACM.

ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT

Homeira Salimi

Selected publications

Integrating Heuristic and Machine-Learning Methods for Efficient Virtual Machine Allocation in Data Centers

Ali Pahlevan, Xiaoyu Qu, Marina Zapater, David Atienza
Published in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Vol. 37, No. 8, pp. 1667-1680, IEEE Press, August 2018. in

HEAL-WEAR: an Ultra-Low Power Heterogeneous System for Bio-Signal Analysis

Loris Duch, Soumya Basu, Rubén Braojos, Giovanni Ansaloni, Laura Pozzi, David Atienza
Published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems: Part I (TCAS-I), Vol. 64, Issue: 9, pp. 2448-2461, IEEE Press, September 2017. in

Big-Data Streaming Applications Scheduling Based on Staged Multi-Armed Bandits

Karim Kanoun, Cem Tekin, David Atienza, Mihaela van der Schaar
Published in IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 65, Issue: 12, pp. 3591-3605, IEEE Computer Society, December 2016. in

3D-ICE: a Compact Thermal Model for Early-Stage Design of Liquid-Cooled ICs

Arvind Sridhar, Alessandro Vincenzi, David Atienza, Thomas Brunschwiler
Published in IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 63, Issue: 10, pp. 2576-2589, IEEE Computer Society, October 2014. in

Compressed Sensing for Real-Time Energy-Efficient ECG Compression on Wireless Body Sensor Nodes

Hossein Mamaghanian, Nadia Khaled, David Atienza, Pierre Vandergheynst
Published in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 58, No. 12, pp. 120-129, IEEE Press, September 2011. in

Development and Evaluation of Multi-Lead Wavelet-Based ECG Delineation Algorithms for Embedded Wireless Sensor Nodes

Francisco Rincon, Joaquin Recas, Nadia Khaled, David Atienza
Published in IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in BioMedicine, Vol. 16, Nr. 11, pp. 1-9, IEEE Press, November 2011. in

Research

Complete Publications List

The complete list of publications can be accessed at the ESL's publications webpage (http://esl.epfl.ch/page-33746.html) or my Google Scholar Page (http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=H1JXhMIAAAAJ).

Teaching & PhD

Current Phd

Wensi Zhang, Amirhossein Shahbazinia, Christodoulos Kechris, Clément Renaud Jean Choné, Anna Burdina, Dimitrios Samakovlis, Tommaso Terzano, Rubén Rodríguez Álvarez, Yuxuan Wang, Karan Pathak, Juan Sapriza, Grégoire Axel Eggermann, Hossein Taji, Kai Zhu, Stasa Kostic, Dimitra Tatli, Pengbo Yu, Simone Machetti, Golnoosh Abdollahinejad, Qunyou Liu, Rafael Medina Morillas, Lara Orlandic, Mingfei Yu, Stefano Albini, Hojjat Karami, Riselda Kodra

Past Phd As Director

Mohamed Mostafa Sabry Aly, Ahmed Yasir Dogan, Arvind Sridhar, Hossein Mamaghanian, Shivani Raghav, Ivan Beretta, Karim Kanoun, Ruben Braojos Lopez, Loris Gérard Duch, Soumya Subhra Basu, Ali Pahlevan, Grégoire Surrel, Fabio Isidoro Tiberio Dell'Agnola, Dionisije Sopic, Arman Iranfar, Elisabetta De Giovanni, Yasir Mahmood Qureshi, Halima Najibi, William Andrew Simon, Farnaz Forooghifar, Benoît Walter Denkinger, Una Pale, Renato Zanetti, Flavio Ponzina, Saleh Baghersalimi, Marco Antonio Rios, Joshua Alexander Harrison Klein, Alireza Amirshahi, Darong Huang, Silvio Zanoli, Masinelli Giulio

Past Phd As Codirector

Jeremy Hugues-Felix Constantin

Courses

Design and Optimization of Internet-of-Things Systems

EE-733

This course provides a complete overview of the most relevant subfields related to Internet of Things (IoT) systems, it presents the perspectives and the underlying technologies, with a particular focus on edge AI architectures and software (AI and TinyML algorithms), communication and Cloud systems

Lab on hardware-software digital systems codesign

EE-390(a)

This course explores hardware-software co-design techniques to develop heterogeneous multi-core embedded systems running Linux on FPGAs. The course explores high-level synthesis tools (HLS) to design hardware accelerators that reduce total execution time and energy consumption for complex tasks.

Microprogrammed Embedded Systems

EE-310

The student will understand the architectures of embedded microprogrammed systems, microprocessor architectures, memory hierarchies, and various Input/Output (I/O) devices, using the Nintendo DS handheld platform as a case study.