BRAIN SPEC Lab · NC State
News
Papers, awards, student milestones, entrepreneurship, and professional service.
2026
- Fall 2026Welcome Amna Hassan to BRAIN SPEC as a Ph.D. student!
- Fall 2026I am pleased to be teaching Microarchitecture Reverse Engineering and Security this semester at NC State! In Fall 2026, students will investigate real processor behavior, reproduce side-channel attacks, and explore hardware defenses. Course overview · Fall 2026 course listing.
- August 2026Congratulations to Ashley Kurian on reaching the Ph.D. preliminary examination milestone at NC State! I am pleased to serve on Ashley’s committee and wish Ashley all the best with the next stage of the research.
- April 2026NC State has featured CacheMind, our work on natural-language, trace-grounded reasoning for computer architecture.
- March 17, 2026Congratulations to Dr. Faiz Alam on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at NC State! I am delighted to celebrate this achievement as a member of his dissertation committee. Wishing Faiz every success in the next chapter! Read his dissertation (PDF).
- March 2026CacheMind has been accepted at ASPLOS 2026. Congratulations to Kaushal Mhapsekar, Azam Ghanbari, and Bita Aslrousta!
- February 2026FeatureBleed has been published in IEEE Computer Architecture Letters.
- 2026I am pleased to serve as Area Chair for HPCA 2027! 2026 review cycle.
- 2026I am pleased to serve as Finance Co-Chair for ISCA 2026! Organizing committee.
- 2026I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for ISCA 2026!
- 2026I’m happy to serve on John McFarland’s graduate advisory committee at NC State and support his Ph.D. research!
- 2026GateBleed has been selected as an IEEE Micro Top Pick from the 2025 computer architecture conferences. IEEE Micro Top Picks recognizes research for its novelty and potential for lasting impact on computer architecture. GateBleed is one of 12 selections for 2026 from work published across 18 eligible conferences in 2025. Top Picks publication · Full PDF bundle.
2025
- December 19, 2025Excited to collaborate with Arm on security research!
- October 2025GateBleed has earned three ACM artifact-evaluation badges at MICRO 2025: Artifacts Available, Artifacts Evaluated — Functional, and Results Reproduced. Congratulations to the team! Published paper with badges.
- July 2025GateBleed has been accepted at MICRO 2025.
- June 13, 2025I am excited to announce that I have founded Art³misia, Inc., an NC State research-based startup advancing Prometheus and related AI and computer-architecture technology toward commercialization.
- Summer 2025Welcome Bita Aslrousta to BRAIN SPEC as a Ph.D. student!
- Summer 2025Welcome Kaushal Mhapsekar to BRAIN SPEC as a Ph.D. student!
- April 2025Congratulations to Seaver Thorn on reaching the Ph.D. preliminary examination milestone at NC State! I am pleased to serve on Seaver’s committee and look forward to the research ahead.
- March 2025Congratulations to Jinyi (Steve) Qiu on passing the Ph.D. qualifying examination at NC State! I am pleased to serve on his CAS qualifying-review committee. Wishing Steve continued success in his doctoral research!
- March 2025Exploiting Intel AMX Power Gating has been published in IEEE Computer Architecture Letters.
- February 2025THOR has been published in IEEE Computer Architecture Letters.
- 2025I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for USENIX Security 2025!
- 2025I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for ISCA 2025!
- 2025Congratulations to Digvijay Anand on completing his M.S. in Computer Engineering at NC State! I am pleased to celebrate this achievement as a member of his thesis committee. Wishing Digvijay all the best in the next chapter! Read his thesis, VAHANA.
2024
- October 17, 2024Delighted to share that our project has been selected for an SRC Research Award! As lead PI, I will work in collaboration with AMD and Intel on securing on-chip AI accelerators against emerging microarchitectural attacks, with research beginning in January 2025.
- Fall 2024Welcome Darsh Asher to BRAIN SPEC as a Ph.D. student!
- August 15, 2024Congratulations to Dr. Anirudh Seshadri on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at NC State! I am delighted to celebrate this achievement as a member of his dissertation committee. Wishing Anirudh all the best in the next chapter! Read his dissertation (PDF).
- June 11, 2024I’m delighted that our Prometheus Tool for Computer System Security Analysis has won NC State’s Chancellor’s Innovation Fund (CIF) award! Prometheus is one of six projects selected for support this year. Award announcement.
2024 Chancellor’s Innovation FundNC State award announcementView full screenshot - May 22, 2024It is a pleasure to welcome patent examiners from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to the BRAIN SPEC Lab at NC State! My students and I are sharing our work through a lab tour and research presentations, and enjoying the discussion with the visiting team.
- April 25, 2024Congratulations to Anshul Naithani on completing his M.S. in Computer Engineering at NC State! I am pleased to celebrate this milestone as a member of his thesis committee. Wishing Anshul every success in the next chapter! Read his thesis on ray tracing and prefetching.
- February 2024Congratulations to Anirudh Seshadri on completing the Ph.D. preliminary examination at NC State! I am pleased to serve on his committee. Best wishes for the next stage of his doctoral research!
- 2024I am pleased to serve as ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) Chair for PACT 2024!
- 2024I am pleased to serve as Publication Chair for MICRO 2024! Organizing committee.
- 2024I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2024!
- 2024I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for ASPLOS 2024!
- 2024I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for MICRO 2024!
- 2024I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for IEEE Micro Top Picks! 2024 review and selection cycle.
- 2024I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for HPCA 2024!
- 2024I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for ACM CCS 2024!
- 2024I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for SEED 2024!
- 2024I am pleased to serve on the NC State ECE Department Head Search Advisory Committee!
2023
- Fall 2023Congratulations to Ferhat Yaman on completing his M.S. in ECE! I am delighted to celebrate this milestone as his thesis advisor and committee chair. Wishing Ferhat all the best in the next chapter! Read his thesis, AgentSCA: Advanced Physical Side Channel Analysis Agent with LLMs (thesis PDF).
- Summer 2023Welcome Joshua Kalyanapu to BRAIN SPEC as a Ph.D. student!
- 2023I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for MICRO 2023!
- 2023I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for HPCA 2023!
- 2023I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for ASPLOS 2023!
- 2023I am pleased to serve as Organizing Chair for ISPASS 2023!
- 2023I am pleased to serve as a judge for the NC State ECE GSA Research Symposium and support our graduate researchers! Spring 2023.
2022
- 2022I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for ASPLOS 2022!
- 2022I am pleased to serve as External Reviewer for ISCA 2022!
- 2022I am pleased to serve as Reviewer for ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)!
- 2022Our papers EVAX (MICRO), Composite Instruction Prefetching (ICCD), and Dynamic Set Stealing to Improve Cache Performance (SBAC-PAD) have been published.
2021
- 2021I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for ASPLOS 2021!
- 2021I am pleased to serve on the Program Committee (PC) for HPCA 2021 Industry Track!
2020
- 2020PerSpectron and CHiRP have been published at MICRO 2020.
- 2020I’m delighted to have been awarded the UC San Diego CSE Postdoctoral Fellowship and to join the 2020 CSE Fellows cohort, with Dean Tullsen as my faculty mentor! UC San Diego’s January 2021 announcement.
2019
- 2019Bit-level Perceptron Prediction for Indirect Branches has been published at ISCA 2019.
2018
- 2018Exploring Predictive Replacement Policies for Instruction Cache and Branch Target Buffer has been published at ISCA 2018.
Professional memberships
IEEE; IEEE Computer Society; IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA); ACM; ACM SIGARCH.