Selected Awards and Honors

2015 - Present

Best University Booth Award - IEEE DATE Conference, 2021

For MELODI: A Mass e-Learning System for Design, Test, and Prototyping of Digital Hardware

Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE) conference selects a handful among all submissions for University Booth Exhibitions during the conference. This year 24 projects were selected for exhibition and our project, MELODI, was selected as the best exhibition. This project is an online system for digital design task assignment and validation, and provides the students to remotely program an FPGA (using partial reconfiguration) and run it on real hardware and see the actuators online using a video stream on their browser.

Best Teacher Award - TU Wien, 2020

Since 2017 students nominate and the rectorate selects the best teacher of each faculty. I have been nominated every year since 2018 and was the winner of the 2020 competition.

Best Distance Learning (Best Course) Award - TU Wien, 2020

For the "System on Chip Architecture and Design" course

Since 2017 students nominate and the rectorate selects the best three courses of the entire university. This year, due to the pandemic, there was a particular emphasis on a smooth transition to distance learning. Moreover, due to the tight competition, the rectorate selected four awardees. I was one of the winners of the best (distance learning) course across the entire university.

1st Prize in Open-Source Hardware Competition - Eurolab4HPC, 2019

For the open-source general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) - Nyuzi

Eurolab for High-Performance Computing (Eurolab4HPC) selected our GPGPU project called Nyuzi (a collaboration with Jeff Bush) as one of the two joint winners of their open-source hardware competition. This competition was part of the Week of Open Source Hardware (WOSH) conference held in June 2019, in Zurich, Switzerland. Technical contribution, the potential impact on high-performance computing, quality of documentation, accessibility of license, and project activity were the selection criteria.

1st Prize in 15th Digilent Design Contest - Digilent, 2019

For the "Remote VHDL Prototyping and Testing Platform"

Digilent selected our project as the best of forty submissions in the 15th edition of their design contest held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Our project uses partial reconfiguration to allow multiple users (in particular students) to remotely instantiate their designs on real FPGA at the same time and interact with it using visual feedback provided by a camera and an interactive website. Technical complexity, implementation structure and reusability, marketability and innovation, written report, and in-person presentation and demonstration of the prototype were the selection criteria.

Best Paper Award - 7th International Conference of MobiHealth, 2017

For the "Enhancing the Self-Aware Early Warning Score System through Fuzzified Data Reliability Assessment"

The awardees were decided by the technical program committee and based on the score they obtained in the review process. Our paper "Enhancing the Self-Aware Early Warning Score System through Fuzzified Data Reliability Assessment" won first place. This paper proposed a self-aware method to improve the reliability of a wearable healthcare system that uses five various biometrics to assess the general health of a subject.

2007-2015

People's Choice in Highly Qualified People (HQP) Video Competition – AUTO21, 2013

For the project "Power Line Communications for Electric Vehicles"

AUTO21 network of excellence conference in Toronto, Canada, in 2013 included a video competition for the first time, for which different projects presented their research and its contribution to the auto industry in a three-minute video. Conference attendees selected our entry as the best video. More than 500 participants from a wide range of backgrounds in technical and human sciences attended the conference.

Best Poster in the Theme at AUTO21 HQP Poster Competition – AUTO21, 2010

For the project "Pollution and Particle Sensors for Environment-Aware Vehicles"

AUTO21 network of excellence (funded by the Canadian government) supports nearly 200 researchers and 350 student researchers at 47 universities across Canada and more than 120 public and private sector organizations. AUTO21 and its partners support projects in six key areas (themes): (i) health, safety and injury prevention; (ii) societal issues; (iii) materials and manufacturing; (iv) powertrains, fuels and emissions; (v) intelligent systems and sensors; and (vi) design processes. Our poster was selected by a jury as the best poster in theme iv, during the 2010 conference in Windsor, Canada.

Full Conference and Travel Grant - European Conference on Circuit Theory and Design, 2009

For "Highly Reliable Harmony Search Algorithm" and "A New High Speed, Low Power Adder: Using Hybrid Analog-Digital Circuits"

The conference committee selected three participants, including me, for a full travel grant that included full-conference registration and accommodation in the five-star hotel, the conference venue. The conference was held in Antalya, Turkey.

Top University Student - Nushirvani University of Technology (NUT), 2007

The rectorate selected the top three students for each department, and they selected me as the best student in the department of electrical and computer engineering.