Welcome to Empas lab. 

Announcements

• Acceptance of Two Work-in-Progress Posters in 62nd Design Automation Conference

The following two papers were selected as Work-in-Progress Posters for the 62nd Design Automation Conference, the Olympics of semiconductor circuit design.

• Sumin Oh, HyunJin Kim, "Late Breaking Results: Self-Motivated Agents for Analog Circuit Optimization via Intrinsic Reward"

• Sumin Oh, HyunJin Kim, "Late Breaking Results: POG: Parameter Optimization using Graph Neural Networks on Reinforcement Learning"

The above papers focus on the circuit parameter optimization using self-motivated agents and GNN-based surrogate models on reinforcement learning. Our EmPasLab will continue the research to expand the applications of machine learning for automated circuit design. Congratulations SuMin Oh!! 

• Best Poster Award-KCS 2025 and JSTS submission approval

SuMin Oh receives Best Poster Award from KCS 2025. (VLSI & CAD). Her paper titled "강화학습 에이전트의 내재적 동기부여를 통한 파라미터 최적화 방법" has also been approved for JSTS submission.  Her paper showed that curiosity-based learning can be effective in optimizing parameters of analog circuits. Congratulations SuMin Oh!! 

• KCS 2025 (High1 Resort)

At Feb. 12-14, 2024, Members of EmPasLab enjoyed research networking, beautiful scenery of the High1 resort, good foods. Four papers were presented, including two papers presented by Ji Su Shin and Su Min Oh.  (➡️pictures)

• Paper Acceptance - ACCV 2024

A paper titled as "HARD: Hardware-Aware lightweight Real-time semantic segmentation model Deployable from Edge to GPU," has been accepted in Asian Conference on Computer Vision 2024. Hanoi, Vietnam. This paper proposes a lightweight structure for semantic segmentation. This is the first approach to implement semantic segmentation on MCU. Congratulation YoungWook Kwon, and Wansoo Kim.  

• Membership Training (DanYang, Chungcheong-do)

At Aug 19-20, 2024, Members of EmPasLab enjoyed the beautiful scenaries of DanYang, Chungchung-do and delicious food called MaeWunTang (Hot fish soup). We visited Gosu-Cave, one of the big caves in South Korea. At night, we played ping-pong and drink high-ball, whisky, etc... Although weather was very hot, mountains covered with green trees and beautiful NamHan River made us happy. (➡️pictures)

• New Funds from Korea governments - 2024.06➡️https://sites.google.com/view/edgeaidku 

From July 2024, new funds from Korea government (July. 2024~Dec. 2028) titled as Development and Operation of a Research and Education Program for Low-cost AI System Integration for Edge will begin, where HW, SW, and applications for Edge AI will be educated and researched with pronoun companies and graduate students. (4.5년 정부 11.25억 지원, 제목: Edge용 초저비용 AI 시스템 융합인재연구교육과정 개발 및 운영, 사업명: 디지털기술선도핵심인재양성(R&D), 세부사업명: 학석사연계ICT 핵심인재양성) 관련기사: ➡️https://www.hankyung.com/article/202407117168h

• Our members will present their paper at the 25th Korea Test Conference for their paper titled as Test pattern prioritization and outlier detection for large-scale IC datasets. (https://dx.doi.org/10.23289/ISTKKTC25.53)Congratulation.

• Lab organization Github (➡️https://www.github.com/EmPasLab)

We start to manage our lab's organization GitHub repositories. Including last open source from our lab, new code and dataset will be released under the control of our lab. 

• Submission of a domestic patent from the collaboration with SK Hynix    

A domestic patent from the collaboration with SK Hynix titled as Similarity-based wafer failure pattern analysis method and apparatus using image matching(이미지 매칭을 이용한 유사도 기반 웨이퍼 고장 패턴 분석 방법 및 장치) has been submitted. Thanks for Young Wook Kwon and Soo min Oh. 

• Participation and Speaking in ICASSP 2024 - 2024.04.18

Three researchers of EmPasLab have participated in ICASSP 2024, Coex, South Korea. In a poster session, our paper was well presented in front of about 20 international researchers. You can see the picture of ICASSP 2024 (➡️pictures). 

• Acceptance of a conference paper- 2024.02.26

I am trilled that our paper titled "A novel method to analysis the wafer defect patterns using an image matching algorithm based on deep neural networks" has been accepted in the Work-in-Progress (WIP) category at the 61th Design and Automation (DAC) conference, taking place on June 23-27th, 2024 at Moscone Center West in San Francisco, California. Although the paper is not selected into regular research papers, the result of the first year's research with SK Hynix are satisfactory. Better results can be expected later. Thanks for my advised students, Youngwook Kwon and Sumin Oh!! 

• Support of AI cloud machine from NIPA-2024.02.10

Fortunately, one AI clould machine (>20 TFLOPS) will be supported from NIPA this year. 

• Registration of a domestic patent - 2024.01.29

A domestic patent titled as "SYSTEMS FOR IMPLEMENTING BINARY NEURAL NETWORKS SUITABLE FOR PYRAMID STRUCTURE (피라미드 구조에 적합한 이진 뉴럴 네트워크 구현 시스템)" by HyunJin Kim has been registered. (Patent Number: 10-2632473)

• Acceptance of a paper - 2023. 12.22

A paper titled as "Low-Biased Probabilistic Multipliers using Complementary Inaccurate Compressors" by HyunJin Kim and Alberto A. Del Barrio has been accepted in Digital Signal Processing. This paper proposes new probabilistic multipliers using complementary inaccurate compressors for achieving better error characteristics. The hardware cost analysis and application for neural networks were also presented in this paper. For this acceptance, we have a long journey. This new can be a good gift for this Christmas vacation.

• Welcome to new member

Jisoo Shin and Yongbean Park will join a new M.S. candidate and an undergraduate researcher.  They will start their research from this winter vacation. Welcome sincerely!!

• Acceptance of a paper - 2023. 12. 13

A paper titled as "1-D SPATIAL ATTENTION IN BINARIZED CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS" by HyunJin Kim, Jungwoo Shin, Wansoo Kim, Alberto A. Del Barrio has been accepted in ICASSP (IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing) 2024. This is the flagship conference hosted by IEEE Signal Processing Society. About 6,000 papers were submitted to this conference, and it has 45% acceptance rate. 

• Participation in K-Chips Workshop - 2023.11

From Nov. 1-3, 2023, several student researchers and Prof. Kim participated in K-Chips Workshop in Jeju. Along with presentation and educational courses, we enjoyed beautiful weather and remarkable ocean views. Besides, delicious foods were very good. You can see several in this link (➡️pictures). 

• New Funds from Korea governments - 2023.07

From July 2023, new funds from Korea government (July. 2023~Dec. 2025) begin, where methods and user interface for building supervised data in wafer testing will be developed. (민관공동투자 반도체 고급인력 양성사업 주관기관 선정)

• 4-th CKAIA (4회 인공지능학술대회)- 2023.07

Our all members attended CKAIA2023 at Yeosu, South Korea and presented a poster titled as “ResidualViT: Better general-purpose Vision Transformer combined with CNN.” Notably, we can have good chance to understand LLM and generative AI. Besides, beautiful scenery of conference site and good dishes were another good things. 

• Best Paper Award at the 24-th Korea Test Conference

Our members won the Best Paper Award at the 24th Korea Test Conference for their paper titled as Study on Wafer Failure Pattern Detection using Image Matching Algorithms.  Congratulation.

• 9-th Open Robotics Seminar - 2023.03

Five researchers attended the 9-th Open Robotics Seminar, held at Robotis Inc., Seoul. There were 13 sessions for introducing ROS applications. Picture

• 30th Korean Conference on Semiconductors (KCS 2023)- 2023.02

Eight researchers attended KCS 2023, held at High-One Resort, Kangwon-do. There were interesting topics including Processing-In-Memory, Hardware Accelerators, etc.  At free time, they enjoyed beautiful scenery and good sightseeing. Picture

• Movements of our AI Servers - 2023.02

We have five servers for machine learning and semiconductor design. These servers will be moved to our department's specific server room. We are happy to avoid noisy sound and hot air from them. 

• Welcome to a New Member - 2023.02

Se-Jin Kwon, an undergraduate student, joined our EmPasLab. She has interest in digging the details and secrets of machine learning. 

• Successful submission to ICML 2023 - 2023.01

At this time, Prof. Kim and Jung-Woo Shin have submitted their BNN (binarized neural networks) works to ICML 2023. ICML is one of top-tier AI conferences. Let's cross finger. 

• Studies with student researchers - 2023.01

During this winter vacation, several ideas and noticeable subjects for artificial intelligence and machine learning will be researched by student researchers and Prof. Kim. Notably, visual transformer, reinforcement learning for handling robot arm, TinyML, RISC-V based Posit arithmetic, BNNs are being focused. Good Luck!!

• Welcome to a New Member - 2022.12

Young-Wook Kwon, a master candidate, joined our EmPasLab. He has interest in developing new visual transformer and inventing ideas for TinyML. 

• New Funds from SK Hynix - 2021.12

From December 2022, new funds from SK Hynix (Dec. 2022~Nov. 2024) begin, where methods and user interface for building supervised data in wafer testing will be developed. 

• Successful submission to ICCAD TinyML Contest

At this time, advised students and Prof. Kim have submitted their TinyML works to ICCAD TinyML Contests. In a small embedded board, binarized neural networks can be implemented, which significantly reduces hardware costs in terms of latency and parameter storage. In this work, this team can fully understand practical implementation of TinyML and methods about how to debug TinyML results. 

• Studies with student researchers (titled as BNNs for sound)

At this time, Prof. Kim and other advised students have studied binarized neural networks (BNNs) from this summer. For 1-D data (e.g. sound), BNNs are a very realistic form to be implemented on lightweight MCUs. Besides, their low latency and low power consumption can extend the applicable area of neural networks. 

• Publication in arXiv - 2022. 06. 26

On June 26, 2022, a manuscript titled as “CTMQ: Cyclic Training of Convolutional Neural Networks with Multiple Quantization Steps” has been uploaded in arXiv.

• A ceremony called Open Lab

On May 23/24, 2022, there is an open lab ceremony to explain the life of graduate schools and method for achieving research contributions. (#403, 2nd Engineering building, Dankook University) 

We have moved old announcements to Recent Announcements. Thanks for your visiting and reading!!