Our Team

Xuan ‘Silvia’ Zhang, PhD

Associate Professor

Email: xuan.zhang@northeastern.edu

Google Scholar Profile

Professor Zhang’s research interests span the fields of IC design/VLSI, computer architecture, and electronic design automation (EDA). She is especially curious about how to build, miniaturize, and optimize autonomous systems for performance, reliability, security, and energy efficiency, with diverse applications in cyber-physical systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), and autonomous robotics.

Arman Akbari

Email: akbari.ar@northeastern.edu

I am a first-year Ph.D. student, co-advised by Prof. Silvia Zhang and Prof. Yanzhi Wang. My research focuses on efficient deep learning and computer vision, with a current emphasis on accelerating vision transformers to optimize computational efficiency. Outside of academia, I enjoy playing violin and staying active through workouts.

Zining Wang

Email: wang.zining@northeastern.edu

I joined Xuan Zhang’s lab after earning my B.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a minor in Computer Science and Data Science, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2024. I am interested in automation in electronic design accelerated by machine learning, particularly in topology generation. I am a Linux Desktop user and open-source contributor.

Ruofan Xing

Email: xing.ruo@northeastern.edu

I joined Prof. Zhang’s lab in 2024 Fall. I’m currently focusing on Image Sensor, Computer Vision, and trying to build sustainable and efficient sensory AI system. Before that, I received my Bachelor’s degree from School of Software, Tsinghua University.

Xiaomeng Yang

Email: yang.xiaome@northeastern.edu

I am a first-year PhD student co-advised by Prof. Xuan Zhang and Prof. Yanzhi Wang. My research focuses on multimodal AI, generative models, and their applications in Electronic Design Automation. I earned my M.S. from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2024 and my B.E. from Zhejiang University in 2021.

Yifei Zou

Email: zou.yife@northeastern.edu

I’m a first year PhD student. I received my B.S degree from University of Washington, Seattle and my M.S from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My research focused on analog and digital circuit and architecture design of AI related sensor and device

Jian Gao

Email: gao.jian3@northeastern.edu

I am a second-year PhD student advised by Prof. Xuan Zhang. My research focused on design automation for analog circuit topology generation and transistor sizing. My B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering were received from Washington University in St. Louis in 2023.

Adith Boloor

Email: adith@wustl.edu

My research involves applying machine learning (ML) to the many facets of robotics, especially computer vision. I also like finding adversaries (security vulnerabilities) in existing ML pipelines, like in self driving vehicles. My current work is about improving the efficiency of ML in hardware. 

Oren Bell

Email: oren.bell@wustl.edu

I’m a fourth year PhD student, working under the co-advisement of Silvia Zhang and Chris Gill. My BS in Computer Engineering was received from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2017. I frequently contribute to the ROS2 codebase, and actively participate in the ROS2 real-time working group. My primary research concerns heterogeneous memory aware zero-copy, a tactic to minimize consumption of memory bandwidth in component-based applications running on heterogeneous hardware.