Gunar Schirner

Associate Professor,  Electrical and Computer Engineering

Contact

Office

  • 617.373.5707

Research Focus

Embedded computer systems; novel architectures for embedded vision; cyber-physical systems; system-level design and methodologies; hardware/software co-design

About

Gunar Schirner holds a Ph.D. degree (2008) and a M.S. degree (2005) in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Irvine. He graduated in computer engineering from the Berufsakademie Berlin, Germany, in 1998. Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty in fall 2009, he was an assistant project scientist at the Center for Embedded Computer Systems (CECS) at the University of California, Irvine. Gunar Schirner also has 5 years of industry experience at Alcatel (now Alcatel-Lucent) where he designed distributed embedded real-time software for telecommunication products. His research interests include embedded system modeling, system-level design, and the synthesis of embedded software.

Research Overview

Embedded computer systems; novel architectures for embedded vision; cyber-physical systems; system-level design and methodologies; hardware/software co-design

Embedded Systems Laboratory

The overarching goal of our research is improving the design of embedded systems that contain both hardware and software. We focus on system-level research that jointly addresses both hardware and software aspects.

Embedded Systems Laboratory

Selected Research Projects

  • Cognitive Distributed Sensing in Congested Radio Frequency Environments
    • – co-Principal Investigator, U.S. Army Research Laboratory
  • Collaborative Research: Nested Control of Assistive Robots through Human Intent Inference
    • – Co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
  • Domain-Specific Computing enabling Real-Time AI Inference on the Edge for Expeditionary Cyber Missions
    • – Principal Investigator, Office of Naval Research

Department Research Areas

Selected Publications

  • N. Teimouri, H. Tabkhi, G. Schirner, Alleviating Scalability Limitation of Accelerator-based Platforms, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), June 2018
  • J. Zhang, H. Tabkhi, G. Schirner, DS-DSE: Domain-Specific Design Space Exploration for Streaming Applications, Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), Dresden, Germany, March 2018
  • N. Teimouri, H. Tabkhi, G. Schirner, Improving Scalability of CMPs with Dense ACCs Coverage, Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), Dresden, Germany, March 2016
  • N. Teimouri, H. Tabkhi, G. Schirner, Revisiting Accelerator-Rich CMPs: Challenges and Solutions, Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Design Automation Conference (DAC), San Francisco, CA, 84, 2015
  • C. Zhang, H. Tabkhi, G. Schirner, Studying Inter-Warp Divergence Aware Execution on GPUs, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, 15(2), 2015, 117-120
  • H. Tabkhi, G. Schirner, Application-Guided Power Gating Reducing Register File Static Power, IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (TVLSI), 22(12), 2014, 2513-2526
  • J. Zhang, G. Schirner, Automatic Specification Granularity Tuning for Design Space Exploration, Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), Dresden, Germany, 2014, 1-6
Deniz Erdogmus

Faculty

May 24, 2023

Kostas Research Institute Receives $13M U.S. Army Contract for Wireless Research

The Kostas Research Institute (KRI) at Northeastern University has been awarded $13 million by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for foundational research into Cognitive Distributed Sensing in Congested Radio Frequency Environments. KRI and five partner institutions will conduct innovative research to enable technologies in distributed machine learning, signal processing algorithms, and computational, sensing, and communication hardware infrastructure for distributed sensing and communication.

Faculty

Sep 10, 2020

Faculty and Staff Awards 2020

Congratulations to all the winners of the faculty and staff awards, and to everyone for their hard work and dedication during the 2019-2020 academic school year.

Faculty

Jun 10, 2019

ECE PhDs Win Best Student Paper Award at PETRA 2019

ECE PhD students Mo Han, PhD’22, Yagmur Gunay, PhD’21, and Ilkay Yildiz, PhD’22, received the best student paper award at PETRA 2019, which took place in Rhodes, Greece, for their paper “From Hand-perspective Visual Information to Grasp Type Probabilities: Deep Learning via Ranking Labels”.

Oct 06, 2015

Eckelman & Schirner to Represent NU at NAE

ECE Assistant Professor Matthew Eckelman and Associate Professor Gunar Schirner have been selected to represent Northeastern University at National Academy of Engineering's seventh Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium. The attendees were nominated by NAE members or deans and chosen from a highly competitive pool of applicants.

Sep 28, 2015

CEE PhD student David Vines-Cavanaugh wins Young Researcher Award

CEE PhD student David Vines-Cavanaugh won first place for the Young Researcher Award at the International Symposium on Non-Destructive Testing in Civil Engineering (NDT-CE 2015).

Sep 16, 2015

Neural Controlled Prosthetics

ECE Associate Professors Denis Erdogmus, Gunar Schirner, & Taskin Padir awarded $603K NSF grant to develop a Hand Augmentation using Nested Decision (HAND) for those with lost limb function.

Aug 12, 2015

Monitoring Marine Mammal with POAWRS

ECE Associate Professors Purnima Makris and Gunar Schirner were awarded a $300K NSF grant for the "Development of an interim passive ocean acoustic waveguide remote sensing system for instantaneous continental-shelf scale marine mammal monitoring, localization and species classification".

Sep 13, 2013

Optimized Computing Space

Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Gunar Schirner and Professor David Kaeli were awarded a $450K National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop "Power Efficient Emerging Heterogeneous Platforms."  The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and […]

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