Chair News

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On Tuesday, October 20, 2026, our wonderful administrative manager, Conny Okuma, was honored with a certificate celebrating her 25 years of dedicated service to TU Dresden. The certificate was officially handed over by the Chancellor of the university, Jan Gerken, during a special ceremony. Before joining our team, Conny worked with Prof. Wolfgang Nagel from mid 2001 to mid 2015. Since then, she has been an incredible support for our team at the Chair for Compiler Construction! We are deeply grateful for everything she does behind the scenes to keep the chair running smoothly and to foster such a positive environment for all our members. Thank you, Conny, for your outstanding dedication over the years, and congratulations on this remarkable milestone!

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The CC Chair had a highly active and successful week at the 2026 ACM/IEEE Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK) in Barcelona! Our group's participation kicked off with a tutorial on Sunday “on Hardware-Aware Compilation for Analog, Digital, and Heterogeneous Computing-in-Memory Systems," co-organized with Asif Ali Khan, João Paulo C. de Lima, and Clément Fournier. João and Clément led the session, providing participants with hands-on experience using our compilation framework for near-in-memory computing systems. All material from the tutorial is publicly available online. During the main CASES 2026 conference, Jiahong Bi presented our work, "LAKSA: An MLIR-based Higher-Level Synthesis Compiler for Edge Inference." His research demonstrates significantly better efficiency on resource-constrained FPGAs compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We are pleased to share that the work is available open source.

Later in the week, Prof. Jeronimo Castrillon delivered a talk on "Compilers for In-Memory Computing Systems" during a special CASES session entitled "A Cross-Stack Approach to Efficient and Scalable Generative AI," organized by Shubham Rai from Bosch and other colleagues. The presentation highlighted our ongoing research and synergies within the SPP 2377, the TRR 404 Active-3D project, ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, and the REC² Excellence Cluster. Finally, Tassilo Tanneberger closed out our group's participation with a presentation at the co-located workshop on Time-Centric Reactive Software. He presented our joint paper with Edward Lee and Erling Jellum, "Macros as Abstractions: Simplifying Code Generation for Lingua Franca,".We are incredibly proud of the team's contributions and thoroughly enjoyed the scientific exchange in Barcelona!

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The CC Chair was represented at the CPS Summer School 2026, held in Alghero, Italy, from 21 to 25 September, by Prof. Jeronimo Castrillon, Jiahong Bi, Robert Khasanov, and Tauseef Ahmed. Seven years after his previous keynote at the school, Prof. Castrillon returned with an invited talk titled “Compilers for Emerging Heterogeneous Systems,” in which he discussed high-level programming and compiler abstractions for high-performance computing, cyber-physical systems, and machine learning. Building on his lecture, Jiahong Bi and Robert Khasanov led a hands-on tutorial introducing LAKSA, an MLIR-based compiler developed within the MYRTUS EU project. Participants followed how LAKSA progressively transforms an application, lowering its computations through MLIR representations, into a dataflow graph and then HLS-oriented code for FPGA implementation. The tutorial also showed how LAKSA’s exported dataflow graph and execution profiles can be used in Mocasin to model and simulate mappings onto heterogeneous platforms and explore system-level trade-offs. We thank the CPS Summer School organisers for the invitation and for hosting an engaging programme in Alghero.

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The CC Chair travelled to São Paulo, Brazil, for this year's Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages (SBLP), which was co-located with the CBSoft 2026 conference. It was a fantastic event bringing together researchers and practitioners from across the software engineering and programming languages communities. Prof. Jeronimo Castrillon had the honor of delivering the SBLP keynote address, titled "Towards Compilers for Emerging Heterogeneous Systems." Additionally, during the very first technical session of the symposium, Christian Schwarz presented our paper "Structure-Aware Compiler Auto-Tuning." This research is a collaborative effort with Anderson Faustino da Silva, who recently spent two years as a guest professor at our chair. Beyond the great technical program, it was awesome to interact with the welcoming Brazilian PL community! We had a fantastic time exchanging ideas, and catching up with colleagues. A big thank you to the organizers and the entire community for such a memorable event!

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We are very happy to officially welcome Luis Schoppik to the CCC team as a PhD student! Luis is already a familiar face at the CC Chair, having worked closely with our group as a student research assistant since May 2025. He obtained his BSc in Computer Science at the University of Passau in 2023 before joining TU Dresden, where he recently completed his MSc in Computer Science. During his master's studies, Luis shifted focus toward compiler construction and emerging hardware which led to him completing his MSc thesis with us on "Compiler Stack and Optimizations for Neural Surrogate of Programs”. A thesis that was supervised by our team members Asif Khan and João de Lima. Prior to his thesis, he worked with us on Compute-in-Memory (CiM) architectures and gained hands-on experience building compilation pipelines with Clement Fournier. Most recently in our group, he has been implementing a novel CiM simulator in the gem5 framework. At the CC Chair, Luis will conduct his PhD research within the COMETH ERC Consolidator Grant project. We are thrilled that Luis has chosen to continue his academic career with us, and we look forward to his future contributions to compilers for extreme heterogeneity!

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We are happy to welcome Zhiyang Wang to the CCC team! Zhiyang obtained his joint MSc degree in Computer Science from VU Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam in March 2026. He conducted his master's thesis on formalizing weak memory models in Lean 4 via the LeanCat framework under the supervision of Andres Goens at the University of Amsterdam. We are particularly pleased about this connection, as Andres previously completed his own PhD in our group! Over the past years, Zhiyang has developed a strong background in compiler techniques, multicore hardware/software co-design, and formal verification. His previous work includes developing a Rust-based compiler frontend mapping to CIRCT/MLIR, as well as an internship at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he worked on verifying RISC-V instructions using Sail and Lean 4. At the CC Chair, Zhiyang will contribute to the ERC Consolidator Grant project COMETH. He will apply his expertise to develop system-level software that bridges the gap between complex hardware and programmer productivity, exploring new programming and compilation methodologies for heterogeneous systems and emerging computing paradigms. We look forward to working with Zhiyang and are excited about having him in the team!

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We warmly welcome Ali Ansari to the Chair for Compiler Construction (CC)! Ali obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. He then worked as a researcher in computer systems and architecture at the renowned PARSA Laboratory at EPFL, where he contributed to the QFlex full-system ARM server simulator and the CloudSuite benchmark suite for modern server workloads. His research has appeared at ISCA and in workshops and tutorials at MICRO and ASPLOS. At the CC chair, Ali will work within the ScaDS.AI center on novel programming methodologies and compilers for ML workloads. His work will have strong synergies with the COMETH ERC Consolidator Grant and the REC² Excellence Cluster. We are very excited to work with him in the coming years!

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The CC team is extremely happy to welcome Jennifer (Jiaxin) Huang!! Jennifer obtained her bachelor’s in Communication Engineering at the Shanghai University in 2015 and her Master’s in Electrical Engineering Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2020. She then joined the TU Dresden where she is will soon receive her PhD under the supervision of Christian Mayr on “A Hybrid Paradigm Compilation System for Efficient SNN Inference on the Heterogeneous Multi-core SpiNNaker2 Neuromorphic Platform”. While doing her PhD Jennifer also worked at Infineon Technologies Dresden (she started as industrial PhD student) and at SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH. In the context, Jennifer worked as (senior) software engineer, working towards the end as head of the compiler team at SpiNNcloud. Her background on building compilation tools for emerging and heterogenous systems is a perfect fit to work at the chair, mostly in the context of the SCADS.AI project, with strong synergies with the COMETH ERC Consolidator Grant and the REC2 Excellence Cluster. We are super excited about working with her in the coming years!

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On the 25th and 26th of June, we participated in two science communication events: the OUTPUT.DD fair and the Dresdner Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften at TU Dresden.

Many curious minds stopped by our stand to learn how intelligent compilers can make software faster and more efficient, and how unconventional computing merges compute and memory to overcome traditional bottlenecks. Our demos included a board running a tiny matrix-vector multiplication in the analog domain, a visualization of matrix tiling for near-memory systems, an interactive mini development editor and compiler that steps through conventional optimizations line by line, and a Minecraft game illustrating the fundamentals of digital circuits. A huge round of applause to everyone involved in organizing and building the demos.

We would like to thank all our visitors. Stay curious, Neugier schafft Wissen :)

 

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The CC Chair was represented at the 2026 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI), the world's leading event in Computational Intelligence research and applications, held in Maastricht, Netherlands, from June 22 to 26, 2026. WCCI brings together three flagship conferences: the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, and the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. At IJCNN 2026, under the Neuromorphic Systems track, Tauseef Ahmed presented his work on "Spiking and Event-driven Neuromorphic Mamba Models for Efficient Speech Recognition." The paper investigates techniques to introduce unstructured sparsity into Mamba-based architectures and explores its benefits for SENECA, the neuromorphic hardware from imec, advancing research in algorithm–hardware co-design.