Jason Cong, a distinguished professor of computer science and holder of the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received the 2024 Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.
Established in 2018, the biennial award is named after Chuck Thacker, who was integral to the development of the first-ever modern personal computer and was a researcher at Microsoft. The honor recognizes individuals or groups who have made surprising, disruptive or leapfrog contributions to computing ideas or technologies.
Cong is being recognized by the association for his fundamental contributions to improving the automation and customization of computing systems, especially in the design and automation of field-programmable systems. He is the fourth recipient of the award and the first from UCLA. The award comes with an invitation to present at a conference and a $100,000 prize, with financial support provided by Microsoft.
For more than 30 years, Cong’s research group, the VLSI Architecture, Synthesis & Technology Laboratory, has been advancing field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) — special integrated circuits that can be programmed after they have been manufactured — and other reprogrammable computing systems.
Cong also directs the UCLA Center for Domain-Specific Computing, which investigates the optimization, compilation and customization of large-scale integrated circuits and systems for significant computing-efficiency improvement in given application domains.
