Duke ECE faculty are leading a Phase 1 Genesis project funded by the Department of Energy to develop robotic AI processing hardware. Discover how they plan to achieve performance 10x faster and 100x more efficient than today’s top devices.

Dear Colleagues,

As we begin a new academic year with students flocking back to campuses nationwide, I am excited to share with you some of Duke ECE's most recent successes.

The past month has been a flurry of activity. Yiran Chen and I returned from a highly successful Design Automation Conference, where the accomplishments of our faculty and students reflected Duke ECE's growing leadership in AI hardware and software. That momentum is evident across the department, with our colleagues also earning recognition for new advances and foundational research in AI security.

Together, these accolades demonstrate Duke ECE's strength across the AI stack. I look forward to sharing more exciting developments from our faculty and students in the months ahead.

Hai "Helen" Li, PhD
Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Marie Foote Reel E’46 Distinguished Professor

Longtime collaborators Hai "Helen" Li and Yiran Chen took home five different awards from this year's Design Automation Conference. Find out what they were recognized for.

Michael Reiter won the 2026 Test of Time award from the USENIX Security Symposium. Discover how his work identified model extraction as a significant cybersecurity threat.

Over 1% of resumes have hidden messages meant to hijack AI and automatically push candidates through. Read how efforts to identify these "prompt-injection" attacks with industry partners is helping to combat the tactic.

How the observed fabric of space-time emerges from fundamental quantum mechanics is one of the great mysteries of the field. Discover how a simplified model could emerge from fundamental quantum degrees of freedom through a technique co-developed by Crystal Noel.

This summer, the LIFT Lab partnered with Inspiring Minds Youth to engage students in interactive STEM lessons. Through hands-on activities, students explored how engineers think, create and innovate while getting a glimpse of topics like AI and robotics.

Follow @Duke ECE on LinkedIn for more!

“The best engineers I’ve ever seen can intuit how a circuit will work before it’s built. They just know if this lever’s pulled, then this will move, and then that will move, etc., and that’s what I’m hoping to instill in our students.”

—KIP COONLEY

on being named a KEEN Engineering Unleashed Fellow

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