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Ruokai Yin

PhD candidate, Electrical Engineering, Yale University

E-mail: ruokai.yin@yale.edu

Bio

Ruokai is currently a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University, where he is advised by Prof. Priyadarshini Panda.

His research focuses on designing low-power computer architectures and systems tailored for energy-efficient AI workloads. He is especially interested in neuromorphic computing, as enablers for bio-plausible and energy-efficient deep learning (spiking neural networks). Additionally, he works on co-designing hardware-aware compression algorithms for neural networks, specifically aimed at enhancing energy efficiency during deployment.

Prior to joining Yale, he earned his B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, majored in in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics. During his undergraduate, he worked with Prof. Joshua San Miguel on designing computer architectures for stochastic computing.

Albuquerque, NM, Dec 2024

            (CV latest update: Feb 2025)

News

  • 2025/03:   »   I will join Microsoft Azure as a Research Intern, working with AI System Architectur team (June - August).
  • 2025/02:   »   DAC 2025 paper accepted.
  • 2024/07:   »   MICRO 2024 paper accepted.
  • 2024/03:   »   I will join Cerebras System as a Research Intern, working with ASIC team (June - August).
  • 2024/03:   »   IEEE TETCI paper accepted.
  • 2023/10:   »   MINT nominated for best paper award at ASP-DAC 2024.
  • 2023/09:   »   ASP-DAC 2024 paper accepted.

Selected Publications

PacQ: A SIMT Microarchitecture for Efficient Dataflow in Hyper-asymmetric GEMMs
Ruokai Yin, Yuhang Li, Priyadarshini Panda
62nd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), June, 2025
[paper]   [code]


LoAS: Fully Temporal-Parallel Dataflow for Dual-Sparse Spiking Neural Networks
Ruokai Yin, Youngeun Kim, Di Wu, Priyadarshini Panda
57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), Nov, 2024
[paper]   [code]   [slides]


Workload-Balanced Pruning for Sparse Spiking Neural Networks
Ruokai Yin, Youngeun Kim, Yuhang Li, Abhishek Moitra, Nitin Satpute, Anna Hambitzer, Priyadarshini Panda
IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 2024
[paper]   [code]


MINT: Multiplier-less INTeger Quantization for Energy Efficient Spiking Neural Networks
Ruokai Yin, Yuhang Li, Abhishek Moitra, Priyadarshini Panda
29th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) (Nominated as Best Paper), Jan, 2024
[paper]   [code]   [slides]


Wearable-based Human Activity Recognition with Spatio-Temporal Spiking Neural Networks
Yuhang Li, Ruokai Yin, Hyoungseob Park, Youngeun Kim, Priyadarshini Panda
36th NeurIPS Workshop on Learning from Time Series for Health (Selected as Spotlight Paper), Dec, 2022
[paper]   [code]


SATA: Sparsity-Aware Training Accelerator for Spiking Neural Networks
Ruokai Yin, Abhishek Moitra, Abhiroop Bhattacharjee, Youngeun Kim, Priyadarshini Panda
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), 2022
[paper]   [code]


Exploring Lottery Ticket Hypothesis in Spiking Neural Networks
Youngeun Kim, Yuhang Li, Hyoungseob Park, Yeshwanth Venkatesha, Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda
18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Oct, 2022
[paper]   [code]


uGEMM: Unary Computing for GEMM Applications
Di Wu, Jingjie Li, Ruokai Yin, Hsuan Hsiao, Younghyun Kim, and Joshua San Miguel
IEEE Micro Top Picks, 2021
[paper]   [code]


uGEMM: Unary Computing Architecture for GEMM Applications
Di Wu, Jingjie Li, Ruokai Yin, Hsuan Hsiao, Younghyun Kim, and Joshua San Miguel
47th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Jun, 2020
[paper]   [code]


Experience

May 2024-Aug 2024

Research Intern, ASIC team
Cerebras Systems

Manger: Vipin Sharma. Architecture design and modeling for Cerebras’s next-generation wafer-scale engine.

July 2021-Present

Graduate Research Assistant, Intelligent Computing Lab
Yale University

Pursuing PhD degree with Prof. Priya Panda. Working on projects that improving the energy efficiency of neural networks, in particular, spiking neural networks.

June 2019-May 2021

Undergraduate Research Assistant, STACS Lab
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Advised by Prof. Joshua San Miguel. Worked on projects that applying unary computing to the deep neural networks. Construted a PyTorch-basede library for unary computing.

Teaching

2023 Fall

Teaching Fellow, EENG 439 Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Yale University

Instructor: Prof. Priya Panda. Course Description.

2023 Spring

Teaching Fellow, EENG 348/CPSC 338: Digital Systems
Yale University

Instructor: Prof. Rajit Manohar. Course Description.