Deming Chen

Deming Chen is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, holding appointments in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department within the Grainger College of Engineering. He serves as a research professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory and an affiliate professor in the Computer Science department. Additionally, he is the Director of the AMD-Xilinx Center of Excellence and the Co-Director of the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute.

Dr. Chen earned his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1995, followed by his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 2001 and 2005, respectively. After working as a software engineer during two periods (1995-1999 and 2001-2002), he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 and became a full professor in 2015.

His research spans reconfigurable computing, AI hardware acceleration, high-level synthesis, cloud computing, and hardware security. Dr. Chen's work has significant industry impact, with open-source solutions like Medusa being integrated into NVIDIA's TensorRT-LLM, improving LLM execution speed by 1.9-3.6x. His research group pursues system-level and high-level design automation, machine learning and cognitive computing, hybrid cloud systems, hardware/software co-design, and FPGA and GPU computing.

His recent publications show a strong trend toward AI acceleration and large language model optimization, with projects like SnapKV and Medusa addressing critical challenges in LLM efficiency. His work consistently bridges theoretical innovation with practical implementation, as evidenced by numerous open-source projects that have been adopted by industry.

• IEEE Fellow (2019)
• Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering (2020-present)
• Google Faculty Award (2020)
• IBM Faculty Award (2014, 2015)
• NSF CAREER Award (2008)
• Ten Best Paper Awards
• TCFPGA Hall-of-Fame paper award
• DAC International System Design Contest wins (2017, 2019)

Dr. Chen has served as PI/Co-PI on over 40 research grants from US Federal agencies and industry partners. He has led numerous open-source projects including FCUDA, DNNBuilder, SkyNet, ScaleHLS, and Medusa, many of which have been adopted by industry. As Editor-in-Chief of ACM TRETS (2019-2025), he increased the journal's impact factor by 3.8x. He actively mentors students and has been recognized as an excellent teacher by UIUC students in 2008 and 2017.

His research group operates at the intersection of hardware and AI, with projects spanning from low-level hardware design to high-level AI applications. The AMD-Xilinx Center of Excellence and IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute provide substantial infrastructure for his team's research in hybrid cloud systems and AI acceleration.