Kenneth (Kenny) Liu
Master's of Applied Science Student.
Heterogeneous Computing Systems Researcher.
Computer Engineering
School of Engineering Science
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive
Burnaby, BC, Canada
Email: ksl24 [at] sfu.ca
About Me
- 2016-2022
- SFU Undergraduate Open Scholarship
- Summer, 2021
- NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award
I'm a Graduate student in Computer Engineering, enrolled in the Accelerated Masters program, in the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University. I am a member of the HiAccel lab, led by Professor Zhenman Fang. Our lab primarily works on High-Level Synthesis (HLS) - leveraging high-level software languages, such as C++ and Python, to design FPGAs.
I began my undergraduate degree in the Fall of 2015, and as part of my education, have obtained a combined total of two years of co-op experience. My co-op placements were as an ASIC developer on Intel's ASIC team, a software programmer at Webb Electronics, and a systems engineering co-op at Optigo Networks.
Research
In the Summer of 2021, I began as an Undergraduate Research Assistant at the HiAccel Lab. I officially started as a Master's student in May of 2022. I extended a previous work, CHIP-KNN. This work used High-Level Synthesis to accelerate the K Nearest Neighbours (KNN) algorithm, widely used in data mining. In the extension, I worked on adding support for fixed-point data points. I also profiled different ways to achieve timing closure in the congested and resource-intensive design. CHIP-KNNv2 has been published in the September 2023 ACM TRETS journal.
I then briefly worked on accelerating Deep Neural Networks on FPGA and was part of a collaboration with Northeastern University which resulted in a paper named HeatViT.
My current project focusses on dynamic data-scheduling in HLS. In particular, we attempt to accelerate querying of a Bloom Filter. A Bloom Filter is a data structure composed of several hash functions, and a large array of bits, known as the bit-vector. This work enables resource-sharing in a Bloom Filter, to allow for parallelizability under the same resource constraints, by sharing the bit-vector between multiple querying engines.
Awards
Contact
Please contact me via email, at: ksl24 [at] sfu.ca
Misc
I've always loved music, and I enjoy singing, playing piano, and playing guitar. I also occasionally fiddle with producing music on FL Studio.
I'm also a casual math enthusiast; in 2019, I participated in the Putnam Competition, and achieved a score of 11/120, placing in the top 30% of the 3,400 participants.