Cynthia Shao

[CynyuS]

Personal Details

Name: Cynthia Shao

Undergrad or MEng? Undergrad

Year in Cornell: 2nd Year

Relevant classes: CS 2110, CS 3110, ECE 2300, CS 3420

Expertise (languages/frameworks/etc.): Python, Java, OCaml, Verilog, C/C++.

Research

When do you want to do research?

I'm interested conducting research in the spring and, if all goes well, I'd want to explore staying at Cornell for research next summer in programs such as BURE.

What is exciting to you about research?

After taking ECE 2300, I became very interested in the intersection between hardware and software, especially how software can optimize and influence hardware design, and I explored the applications of LLMs to hardware design through research at the CSL last summer. Through that experience, I really enjoyed the process of researching and getting to deeply understand a problem, and being able to engineer a product that would actually have an impact.

What kind of research do you want to do?

I am looking into research on high level synthesis, electronic design automation, hardware accelerators, and compilers!

Background

Was there a paper that particularly excited you?

During my deep dive into the intersection between hardware and software, this paper on domain-specific hardware accelerators just expanded my idea for the vast amount of research into the many software workarounds of Moore's Law.

Which of the current research projects would you be interested in working on and why?
Rio, the language for programmable packet scheduling that compiles down to an FPGA really excites me! I did a mini-passion project on TCP packet scheduling written in Verilog, and I would be so excited to write software that can optimize and compile the higher level language down to an FPGA. I would also be interested in working on Calyx! After talking to Parth about his work on Calyx, I was very inspired by the language's construction - marrying structure and control flow is an intricate and interesting way to have the ease of software abstractions without sacrificing efficiency. I would be very excited to work on the optimizations of architecture!

Anything else you want to tell us about yourself?
I am still very new to the field of compilers, and have only self-studied them so far, but after creating a mini-csv compiler in 3110 I was very excited to dive deeper into this topic!

Attach a CV/Resumé:

resume_Cynthia_Shao.pdf