Yiran Chen

Yiran Chen
陈怡然
Yiran Chen
Yiran Chen's Portrait
Born (1976-02-29) February 29, 1976 (age 50)
Zhengzhou, Henan, China
Education
Known for
SpouseHai "Helen" Li
Children2
Awards
  • IEEE/ACM A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation (2026)
  • Member of European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2025)
  • NAI Fellow (2023)
  • AAAS Fellow (2022)
  • ACM Fellow (2020)
  • IEEE Fellow (2018)
Scientific career
Theses
  • Design Techniques for Power Efficiency and Robustness in Scaled High-performance Systems  (2005)
  • Research on Dynamic Property and Gain-Clamping of EDFA  (2001)
Other academic advisors
Chong-Cheng Fan
Websiteece.duke.edu/people/yiran-chen/

Yiran Chen (Chinese: 陈怡然; pinyin: Chén Yírán; born February 29, 1976) is a Chinese-born American computer scientist and electrical engineer whose research concerns emerging memory technologies, neuromorphic computing, and machine-learning systems. He is the John Cocke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, where he directs the U.S. National Science Foundation AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging Next Generation Networks (Athena) and the Institute of AI Engineering.

Early life and education

Chen was born in Zhengzhou, Henan, China, into a family of middle-school teachers. He entered the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1994, was selected for an accelerated "4+2" program, and completed his undergraduate degree in 1998. He received an M.S. from Tsinghua in 2001, advised by Chongcheng Fan, and a Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2005, advised by Kaushik Roy and Cheng-Kok Koh.

Career and research

Chen worked at Synopsys in Silicon Valley from 2005 to 2007, where he developed PrimeTime VX, a statistical static timing analysis tool. In 2007, he and his wife, Hai (Helen) Li, joined Seagate Technology's Advanced Technology Group as circuit designers working on spintronic memory. He joined the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in 2010 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2014.

Chen moved to Duke University in January 2017 and was named the John Cocke Distinguished Professor in 2023. In 2021, he received a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish and direct Athena, an NSF AI institute focused on edge computing. In 2026, he became director of Duke's Institute of AI Engineering. With Hai Li and Huanrui Yang, he published the textbook Machine Learning and Neural Networks: A Computer Engineering Perspective (Springer, 2026), and he received the Duke Graduate School's Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring in 2024.

At Seagate, Chen led the design of a 16-kilobit spin-transfer torque random-access memory (STT-RAM) test chip and co-authored a 2009 study describing a spintronic memristor, which was covered by IEEE Spectrum. His 2008 paper proposing 3D-stacked magnetic RAM as on-chip memory received the IEEE/ACM A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation in 2026.

Two of his group's 2014 papers on neural-network accelerators based on nonvolatile memory received ten-year retrospective influential-paper awards from ASP-DAC (2024) and ICCAD (2023). His 2016 NeurIPS paper introduced structured-sparsity methods for compressing neural networks and was ranked by Paper Digest among the most influential NeurIPS 2016 papers. His work has also received best-paper awards at DATE 2017, KDD 2020, MICRO 2021, ASP-DAC 2023, and the 2024 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, as well as the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award. At the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning, his group presented LaMAGIC, a language-model-based method for generating analog circuit topologies.

Chen co-founded the Duke Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence and the NSF Industry–University Cooperative Research Center for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing. He served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine from 2020 to 2023 and became founding editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Artificial Intelligence in 2024. He chaired ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation from 2021 to 2024 and the steering committee of the IEEE Non-Volatile Memory Systems and Applications Symposium, and served on a National Academies committee on machine learning in safety-critical applications from 2022 to 2025.

Awards and honors

Selected publications

Other activities

While at Tsinghua, Chen and several classmates co-founded the Weilan online bookstore (welan.com). His Weibo channel on research and higher education has more than 591,000 followers. He is a founding member of the steering committee of the Academic Alliance on AI Policy and has commented on artificial intelligence in media outlets including Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Reuters.

Personal life

Chen is married to Hai (Helen) Li, the Marie Foote Reel E'46 Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. They have two sons.

References

  1. 1 2 "Duke Awards 44 Distinguished Professorships". Duke Today. May 4, 2023. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  2. 1 2 "Athena: AI Institute for Edge Computing". Duke University. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  3. 1 2 "Yiran Chen: Academic Experience". Scholars@Duke. Duke University. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 "怡"颗清华心 扬帆创未来——访清华电子系1994级校友陈怡然 [Interview with Yiran Chen, Tsinghua Electronic Engineering class of 1994]. Tsinghua Alumni Association (in Chinese). March 22, 2021. Archived from the original on July 22, 2026. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  5. ↑ Master's thesis: Research on Dynamic Property and Gain-Clamping of EDFA, Tsinghua University, 2001.
  6. ↑ Ph.D. thesis: Design Techniques for Power Efficiency and Robustness in Scaled High-performance Systems, Purdue University, 2005.
  7. ↑ "Invisible Shield: Technology overview (inventor profile of Yiran Chen)" (PDF). University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  8. ↑ "Synopsys Extends PrimeTime and Star-RCXT With Statistical Capabilities To Address Variation-Aware Design Challenges" (Press release). Synopsys. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  9. 1 2 Y. Chen, H. Li, X. Wang, W. Zhu, W. Xu and T. Zhang, "A 130 nm 1.2V/3.3V 16 Kb Spin-Transfer Torque Random Access Memory with Nondestructive Self-Reference Sensing Scheme," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC), vol. 47, no.2, Feb. 2012, pp. 560-573.
  10. 1 2 "Yiran Chen". Duke Electrical & Computer Engineering. Duke University. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  11. ↑ "Yiran Chen". IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  12. ↑ "NSF Launches Artificial Intelligence Research Center at Duke". Duke Today. July 29, 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  13. ↑ Chen, Claire (September 30, 2025). "Pratt considers proposal for new AI engineering institute, undergraduate major". The Duke Chronicle. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  14. ↑ "Machine Learning and Neural Networks: A Computer Engineering Perspective". Springer. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  15. ↑ "2024 Dean's Award: Yiran Chen, Ph.D." Duke University Graduate School. March 19, 2024. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  16. ↑ X. Wang, Y. Chen, H. Xi, H. Li, and D. V. Dimitrov, "Spintronic Memristor through Spin Torque Induced Magnetization Motion," IEEE Electron Device Letters (EDL), Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 294-297, Mar. 2009.
  17. ↑ Savage, Neil (March 16, 2009). "Spintronic Memristors". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  18. ↑ X. Dong, X. Wu, G. Sun, Y. Xie, H. Li, and Y. Chen, "Circuit and Microarchitecture Evaluation of 3D Stacking Magnetic RAM (MRAM) as a Universal Memory Replacement," ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), Jun. 2008, pp. 554-559.
  19. 1 2 "Magnetic Memory: Laying the Foundations for Modern AI". Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. June 29, 2026. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  20. ↑ B. Li, Y. Wang, Y. Wang, Y. Chen, and H. Yang, "Training Itself: Mixed-signal Training Acceleration for Memristor-based Neural Network," Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), Jan. 2014, pp. 361-366.
  21. ↑ B. Liu, H. Li, Y. Chen, X. Li, T. Huang, Q. Wu, and M. Barnell, "Reduction and IR-drop Compensations Techniques for Reliable Neuromorphic Computing Systems," IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), Nov. 2014, pp. 63-70.
  22. ↑ W. Wen, C. Wu, Y. Wang, Y. Chen, and H. Li, "Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks," Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Dec. 2016.
  23. ↑ "Most Influential NIPS Papers (2021-02)". Paper Digest. February 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  24. ↑ J. Mao, X. Chen, K. Nixon, C. Krieger, and Y. Chen, "MoDNN: Local Distributed Mobile Computing System for Deep Neural Network," Design, Automation & Test in Europe (DATE), Mar. 2017, pp. 1396-1401.
  25. ↑ A. Li, Y. Duan, H. Yang, Y. Chen, and J. Yang, "TIPRDC: Task-Independent Privacy-Respecting Data Crowdsourcing Framework for Deep Learning with Anonymized Intermediate Representations," ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Aug. 2020, pp. 824-832.
  26. ↑ "Fast Power Modelling for Accurate CPU Power Introspection". Arm Research. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  27. ↑ C.-C. Chang, J. Pan, Z. Xie, J. Hu, and Y. Chen, "Rethink before Releasing your Model: ML Model Extraction Attack in EDA," Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), Jan. 2023, pp. 252-257.
  28. ↑ J. Sun, Z. Xu, H. Yin, D. Yang, D. Xu, Z. Du, Y. Chen, and H. R. Roth, "FedBPT: Efficient Federated Black-box Prompt Tuning for Large Language Models on the Edge," Federated Learning on the Edge Symposium of The AAAI Spring Symposium series (SSS), Mar. 2024.
  29. ↑ "Chen Wins IEEE Pederson Award". Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  30. ↑ C.-C. Chang, Y. Shen, S. Fan, J. Li, S. Zhang, N. Cao, Y. Chen, and X. Zhang, "LaMAGIC: Language-Model-based Topology Generation for Analog Integrated Circuits," the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/chang24c.html
  31. ↑ "Duke Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence". Duke University. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  32. ↑ "NSF IUCRC for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing". Duke University. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  33. ↑ "Chen Named Inaugural Editor-in-Chief of AI-Focused Journal". Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. February 29, 2024. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  34. ↑ "ACM SIGDA E-Newsletter, July 2021" (PDF). ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation. July 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  35. ↑ "Organizing Committee". IEEE Non-Volatile Memory Systems and Applications Symposium 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  36. ↑ "Using Machine Learning in Safety-Critical Applications: Setting a Research Agenda". National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  37. ↑ "2023 NAI Fellows List" (PDF). National Academy of Inventors. December 2023. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  38. ↑ "Congratulations to the 2023 IEEE CAS Society Award Recipients". IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  39. ↑ "2022 AAAS Fellows". American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  40. ↑ "Chen Wins IEEE 2022 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award". Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. January 27, 2022. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  41. ↑ "2021 Outstanding Electrical & Computer Engineers". Purdue University Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  42. ↑ "2020 ACM Fellows recognized for work that underpins contemporary computing" (Press release). Association for Computing Machinery. January 13, 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2026 – via GlobeNewswire.
  43. ↑ "Professor Yiran Chen Named IEEE Fellow". Duke Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence. November 18, 2017. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  44. ↑ "Yiran Chen on Weibo". Sina Weibo. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  45. ↑ "Academic Alliance on AI Policy". Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  46. ↑ "China's Manus Follows DeepSeek in Challenging US AI Lead". Bloomberg. March 10, 2025.
  47. ↑ "What DeepSeek's Success Says About China's Ability to Nurture Talent". The New York Times. February 10, 2025.
  48. ↑ Wagstaff, Jeremy (June 7, 2012). "Pushing the PRAM: when chips just can't get any smaller". Reuters.
  49. ↑ "Hai "Helen" Li". Duke Electrical & Computer Engineering. Duke University. Retrieved July 21, 2026.
  50. ↑ "Interview with Dr. Yiran Chen". EDN. Retrieved July 21, 2026.