Two former research assistant professors at Tandon, Dr. Hammond Pearce and Dr. Benjamin Tan were recently awarded major corporate recognition. Pearce, now a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has been awarded funds by Google for his project exploring the discovery and repair of critical flaws in the design of computer chips. Meanwhile, Tan, now an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, was named by Intel as one of 10 Outstanding Researchers for 2024.

Under the umbrella of the Google Research Scholar Program, Pearce received a  $92,000 grant to help develop his work in automated hardware security analysis using Large Language Models. The research initiative aims to “revolutionise how hardware vulnerabilities are detected and mitigated before chips reach the manufacturing stage.” With participants selected based on the potential impact of their work and their ability to address pressing global challenges, the award is extremely competitive. Dr Pearce is one of just three Australian researchers selected for the award.

Tan received his award from Intel for a project titled “Development of a Common Weakness Enumeration Exploration Toolkit for Register Transfer Level.” According to the official awards announcement from Intel, Tan led the research team that  proposed a register transfer level (RTL) static analysis scanner to “detect hardware common weakness enumerations” and to “demonstrate feasibility for open-source chip designs.”  They also developed a proof of concept for determining root cause failures in digital hardware design processes. This research effort was conducted in close collaboration with Pearce, as well as Professor Ramesh Karri and NYU Tandon graduate students. 

Both Tan and Pearce remain frequent collaborators with CCS faculty. Most recently, they were both part of the VeriGen project team, which was led by Institute Professor Siddharth Garg, and involved six other CCS-affiliated researchers.