Rakesh Kumar

Rakesh Kumar is a Professor and John Bardeen Faculty Scholar in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work focuses on computer architecture, system-level design automation, and low-power computing.

• PhD in Computer Engineering from University of California, San Diego
• BS in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur

His research spans all layers of the computing stack, with key contributions to flexible computer systems, waferscale computing, error-resilient architectures, and approximate computing. He has pioneered work on voltage-reliability tradeoffs and peak power management techniques.

Recent publications highlight trends in space microdatacenters, printed microprocessors, and neural graph accelerators. His work on plastic chips was recognized as one of the three biggest semiconductor headlines of 2022 by IEEE Spectrum.

• IEEE Fellow (2024)
• ISCA Influential Paper Award
• MICRO Test-of-Time Award
• ICCAD Ten Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award
• Best Paper Awards at CASES, SELSE, HPCA

He has received teaching accolades including the Stanley H. Pierce Faculty Award and Ronald W. Pratt Outstanding Teaching Award. His research group explores hardware-software co-design for emerging applications in AI, IoT, and sustainable computing.