Professor David Atienza Alonso | |
|---|---|
 David Atienza Alonso | |
| Born | 1978 (age 46–47) |
| Citizenship | Spain,Switzerland |
| Board member of | Associate Vice President of Centers and Platforms of EPFL (2024-) Chair of the EDAA (2022-2024) Director of the Section of Electrical Engineering of EPFL (2019–2022) President of IEEE CEDA (2018–2019) General Chair of DATE (2017) Technical Program Chair of DATE (2015) Gold Member of the Board of Governors IEEE CASS (2010–2012) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Computer Engineering Computer Architecture Computer Science |
| Alma mater | Complutense University of Madrid IMEC, Leuven, Belgium |
| Doctoral advisor | Francky Catthoor, and J. Mendias |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Engineering Computer engineering Electronics |
| Institutions | École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) |
| Main interests | Embedded Systems Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Low-power Electronics Thermal management (electronics) Computer cooling Edge Computing Wearable Devices Data Center Machine Learning |
| Website | https://www.epfl.ch/labs/esl/ |
David Atienza Alonso is a Spanish/Swiss scientist in the disciplines ofcomputer andelectrical engineering. His research focuses on hardware‐software co‐design and management for energy‐efficient and thermal-aware computing systems, always starting from a system‐level perspective to the actual electronic design. He is afull professor of electrical and computer engineering at theSwiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Associate Vice President of Research Centers and Platforms, and the head of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL).[1] He is anIEEE Fellow (2016),[2] and anACM Fellow (2022).[3]
David Atienza studiedcomputer science and engineering atComplutense University of Madrid (UCM) and gained his Bachelor's and M.Sc. degrees in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He then received anEU Marie Curie Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. degree jointly fromIMEC inBelgium and UCM inintegrated circuit design andembedded systems design. After his graduation in 2005, he joined the Department of Computer Architecture and Engineering of UCM as an assistant professor, receiving the accreditation from theSpanish National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) to become associate professor in late 2006 at UCM. He then became a tenure-trackassistant professor at EPFL in 2008, anassociate professor in early 2014,[4] and afull professor since 2021.[5] Since October 2024, he is serving as the Associate Vice President (Associate Provost) of Research Centers and Platforms at EPFL.
At the Embedded Systems Laboratory ofEPFL, Prof. David Atienza works on system-level design and management for energy-efficient computing systems. In particular, he investigates co-design and optimization approaches across the complete spectrum of computing systems, from high-performancemulti-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) servers anddata centers to low-powerInternet-of-Thing (IoT) systems andwearables. His contributions in these areas always target to go beyond hardware and software boundaries forefficient energy use by developing (1) new thermal‐aware optimization and run‐time management of 2D/3D multi‐processorservers and data centers, and (2) cross-layer design methodologies for ultra‐low power smart wearables, edgeartificial intelligence (AI) and IoT systems. In these fields, he has co-authored more than 400 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and conferences, several book chapters, and 14 patents.
Prof. Atienza is a pioneer of innovative thermal-aware design and new cooling technologies forsystem-on-chip architectures. This includes working withIBM on theMicrofluidics cooling of computer servers, allowing for multilayer stacks of 3D MPSoCs that can be simultaneously supplied with power and cooling through liquid media.[6][7] A clear example of the long-term impact of Prof. Atienza in this area is the development of the 3D Interlayer Cooling Emulator (3D-ICE) tool,[8] which was used in the design ofAquasar, the first chip-level water-cooled server by IBM. The different versions and updates of 3D-ICE have been available since 2012 asopen-source for the research community in computer engineering andEDA tools, and is used for transient thermal modeling of 2D/3D MPSoC designs with multiple cooling technologies by numerous academic and industrial groups worldwide.
Prof. Atienza also works on smart embedded systems andedge computing for autonomous health monitoring and telemedicine. In this area, he has developed important contributions on methodologies for the design and optimization of energy-efficient and adaptive smart wearables andInternet-of-Things (IoT) systems. In particular, he developed a new generation of ultra-low-power and reconfigurable MPSoC architectures for smart wearables based on compressive sensing (in particular for real-time multi-lead ECG processing). Then, in the last years, he has proposed to enhance microcontroller-based architectures with HEAL-WEAR, a novel kernel processing accelerator based on coarse-grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) technology to enable multi-parametric smart wearables with edgeartificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. This new MPSoC wearable architectures and the related AI algorithms for automatic bio-signal analysis and pathologies detection are licensed and used by a large number of providers of ambulatory, continuous, real-time outpatient management solutions. His current research in this area includes the engineering of next-generationultra-low-power edge computing systems including emergingnanotechnologies, such asRRAM architectures.[9]
Additional recent industrial applications of the work of Prof. Atienza in energy-efficient algorithms andsmart embedded computing systems include research on navigational systems forClearSpace-1,[10]deep learning forFacebook'srecommendation systems,[11] and the latest capsule recognition technology used byNespresso.[12]
As Prof. Atienza built up his academic reputation, he was awarded anOracle External Research Faculty Award (2011),[13] theSIGDA ACM Outstanding New Faculty Award (2012)[14] (first case ever awarded outside the USA), and theIEEE CEDA Early Career Award (2013).[15] He was appointed Editor-in-Chief ofIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)[16] in the period 2022–2023.
His achievements as professor at EPFL were recognised, among others, with anERC Consolidator Grant (2016),[17] the IEEE Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Mid-Career Award (2018),[18] theDAC Under-40 Innovators Award (2018),[19] theICCAD 10-Year Most Influential Paper Award (2020).[20] and the CODES+ISSS Test of time Award at theEmbedded Systems Week (2024).[21]
In 2016, Prof. Atienza was namedIEEE Fellow for “his contributions to design methods and tools for MPSoCs”.[2]
Also, in 2022, he was recognized as anACM Fellow for "contributions to the design of high-performance integrated systems and ultra-low power edge circuits and architectures".[22]
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