Faculty Spotlight: Hassan Najafi

M. Hassan Najafi, PhD, joined the School of Computing and Informatics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as an assistant professor in August 2018. He received his PhD in Electrical and Electronics Engineering in 2018 from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, MN, USA. He received his MS in Computer Architecture in 2014 from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, and his BS in Computer Engineering in 2011 from the University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran.

Dr. Najafi's research interests as a hardware engineer are stochastic and approximate computing, computer architecture, computer-aided design, energy-efficient VLSI design, and machine learning. The primary goal of his research is to improve energy efficiency and error resilience of digital systems with an emphasis on image and video signal processing systems. His research to date realizes this goal by exploiting unconventional computing paradigms such as stochastic computing (SC) and unary processing. During his doctoral research, he developed new design methodologies and novel research directions to the SC field by introducing polysynchronous clocking, time-based computing using stochastic constructs, reconfigurable sequential stochastic architectures, high-quality down-sampling for deterministic approaches of SC and integrating analog memories with stochastic systems.

In recognition of his research, he received the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Minnesota and the Best Paper Award at the 2017 35th IEEE International Conference on Computer Design. His work on developing polysynchronous stochastic circuits was selected as the Feature Paper of the Month in the October 2017 issue of the IEEE Transactions on computers.

Contact Dr. Najafi or learn more through these links:
najafi@louisiana.edu
Hassan Najafi's site