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Prof. Hassoun receives the ACM/SIGDA 2007 Distinguished Service Award

June 7, 2007

The ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) awarded Tufts' Associate Professor Soha Hassoun the ACM/SIGDA 2007 Distinguished Service Award for "outstanding contributions to the creation of the SIGDA/DAC Ph.D. Forum at DAC, on the occasion of its 10th edition". Aimed at strengthening ties between academia and industry, the PhD Forum at DAC, a competitive poster session, provides Ph.D. students an opportunity to present and discuss their dissertation research with people in the EDA community. Hassoun started the Forum in 1998, a newly appointed assistant professor at Tufts. "The creation of the Ph.D. Forum by Soha Hassoun was a major contribution to SIGDA's relationship to our members. It transformed our mundane 'member meeting' into a major scholarly and social event at DAC," said Steve Levitan, general chair of 44th DAC executive committee and previous chair of SIGDA. "The Ph.D. Forum celebrates the work of the best Ph.D. students in our field and, in so doing, gives visibility for SIGDA to the EDA community as a whole." The Ph.D. Forum has grown steadily since it was established by Hassoun ten years ago, and is now one of the premier venues for students in design automation to get feedback on their research and for industry to see academic work in progress. Participation in the forum is competitive, with an acceptance rate of about 30 percent and 30-35 students presenting each year and up to 500 attendees in recent years. "Participating in the Ph.D. Forum as a student, offered me a unique opportunity not only to find the problems in upcoming research areas, but also to understand the complex and continuously evolving amalgam of EDA, comprising semiconductor companies, CAD vendors, startups, and academia," said Shelar Rupesh, Intel, and 2003 (6th) Ph.D. Forum participant. "The interactions and collaborations I had at the Ph.D. Forum when I participated as a graduate student in 1999, led to a couple of U.S. patents filed/issued, and several ideas and technologies out of my Ph.D. research that were ultimately used by leading semiconductor manufacturers," said David Z. Pan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Texas, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. This year marks the 10th annual ACM SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC. It was held on Tuesday, June 5 from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. in the Sails Pavilion of the San Diego Convention Center.