Sophia Shao

Yakun Sophia Shao

Assistant Professor

SK Hynix Faculty Fellow

EECS, UC Berkeley

ysshao [at] berkeley [.] edu


Cory 570, Berkeley, CA 94720


[CV] [Google Scholar]
I am an Assistant Professor and an SK Hynix Faculty Fellow at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department of University of California, Berkeley. My research interests are in the area of computer architecture, with a special focus on specialized accelerator, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology. Previously, I was a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research and received my Ph.D. degree in 2016 from Harvard University.

My work has been awarded a Distinguished Artifact Award at ISCA 2023, the Best Paper Award at DAC 2021, the Best Paper Award at JSSC 2020, a Best Paper Award at MICRO 2019, Top Picks in Computer Architecture (2014), and Honorable Mentions (2019*2). My Ph.D. dissertation was nominated by Harvard for ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. I am an SK Hynix Faculty Fellow and a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, the 2022 IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award, a Google Faculty Rising Stars Award in Systems Research, a Google Research Scholar Award, a Facebook Research Award, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant, and the inaugural Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili Award.

I am looking for motivated Ph.D. and M.S. students, postdoctoral scholars, and undergraduate researchers. If you are interested, please email me with a copy of your CV to start a conversation. If you are an undergraduate student at Berkeley interested in doing research, please fill out this interest form.
Education
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Sept 2009 - May 2016
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Master of Science in Computer Science
Sept 2009 - May 2014
Zhejiang University, China
Bachelor of Electrical Engineering
Sept 2005 - May 2009
Professional Experience
Assistant Professor
UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
Aug 2019 - present
Senior Research Scientist
NVIDIA, Santa Clara, CA
Oct 2018 - July 2019
Research Scientist
NVIDIA, Santa Clara, CA
July 2016 - Sept 2018
Research Intern
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
July 2015 - Sept 2015
Research Intern
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
July 2014 - Sept 2014
Research Intern
Intel Labs, Santa Clara, CA
June 2012 - Sept 2012
Recent News
08/2023: Sophia gives a talk at Intel.
07/2023: Our work on virtualized accelerator interface for multi-tenant execution is accepted at MICRO. Congrats all!
07/2023: Our work on building differentiable models for hardware-mapping co-search is accepted at MICRO. Congrats all!
06/2023: Congrats to the RoSÉ team for winning an ISCA Distinguished Artifact Award!
06/2023: Sophia receives a Google Research Scholar Award. Thanks Google for the generous support!
06/2023: We wrote a retrospective article on our Aladdin work, originally published at ISCA 2014, as part of the ISCA50 celebration.
05/2023: The SLICE and BWRC summer retreats went well. Thanks all for the support and feedback!
05/2023: Sophia gives a keynote at the EuroMLSys workshop.
05/2023: Sophia gives a talk at Samsung.
04/2023: Sophia gives a talk at Intel.
03/2023: Our work on building hardware-software co-simulation infrastructure for robotics is accepted at ISCA. Congrats all!
03/2023: Our work on building compression/decompression accelerators for hyperscale systems is accepted at ISCA. Congrats all!
02/2023: Sophia gives a talk at Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS) to celebrate 50 years of Berkeley EECS!
02/2023: Sophia co-chairs the ML session at ISSCC'2023.