Wei Zeng
University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical and computer engineering PhD student Wei Zeng earned second place in the programming contest held as part of the International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis (IWLS) 2020. Ten teams from universities across the globe participated in the competition.
Wei’s team also included electrical and computer engineering professor and PhD advisor Azadeh Davoodi as well as Dr. Rasit Topaloglu, an engineer at IBM.
The participants were challenged to write a computer program to learn an unknown Boolean function from a small training set consisting of input-output pairs and generate a size-limited logic circuit.
An overview of the competition, which took place in June 2020, and details of the approaches applied by each team are compiled in the paper “Logic Synthesis Meets Machine Learning: Trading Exactness for Generalization” which appeared as an invited paper in a special session of the conference Design, Automation, and Test in Europe, held virtually in February 2021.