Yiran Chen, Ph.D.

About

Yiran Chen earned his B.S. in 1998 and M.S. in 2001 from Tsinghua University and completed his Ph.D. in 2005 at Purdue University. In 2010, he joined the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor, where he was later promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2014, holding the prestigious Bicentennial Alumni Faculty Fellowship. He currently serves as the John Cocke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Dr. Chen is the Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging (Athena), one of the 27 National AI Institutes in the United States. He also leads the NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing (ASIC) and co-directs the D

Education

• Ph.D. Purdue University, 2005
• John Cocke Distinguished Professor
• Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Director of the Institute of AI Engineering
• Professor of Computer Science

Selected publications

• Navardi M, Fu Y, Lin Y, Li H, Chen Y, Mohsenin T. Generative AI at the Edge: A Comprehensive Survey of Architectures, Hardware and Applications. ACM Computing Surveys. 2026 Nov 30;58(15):1u201339.
• Lu Y, Au HI, Zhang J, Pan J, Zhou G, Wang Y, et al. AutoEDA: Enabling EDA Flow Automation through Microservice-Based LLM Agents. ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems. 2026 Aug 20;
• Horton M, Park C, Molom-Ochir T, McGarry W, Gu J, Chen Y. A Differentiable Simulator for Optimizing Time-Domain Analog CNN Accelerators. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design. 2026.
• Chen Y. August 2026 Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Artificial Intelligence. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Artificial Intelligence. 2026 Aug 1;3(4):218u20139.
• Shan H, Wei C, Guo C, Fu Y, Liang T, Li H, et al. Frame Skipping Architecture for Video-Language Model Acceleration. In: Glsvlsi 2026 Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2026. 2026. p. 824u20139.
• Chen Y. 2026Q3 Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Artificial Intelligence. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Artificial Intelligence. 2026 Jun 1;3(3):152.
• Li Y, Cheng Y, Ma M, Zou Y, Yang N, Cheng W, et al. Skilled AI Agents for Embedded and IoT Systems Development. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems Cais 2026. 2026. p. 1248u201352.
• Chang CC, Lin WH, Shen Y, Zhou G, Chen Y, Zhang X. LaMAGIC: Advanced Circuit Formulations for Language-Model-based Topology Generation for Analog Integrated Circuits. ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems. 2026 Apr 11;31(5).
• Chen Y. 2026Q2 Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Artificial Intelligence. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Artificial Intelligence. 2026 Apr;3(2):76u20137.
• Wang R, Pan J, Chen Y, Hu J. AstroTune: AST-Assisted LLM Retrieval for Cross-Stage Design Flow Parameter Tuner. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Physical Design. 2026. p. 144u201352.