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Robert A. WalkerProfessor & Department Chair,
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Aruba
Arizona & Nevada
4th of July
Dr. Walker is very active in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), where he is currently serving on the ACM SIG Governing Board and ACM Council. He has been deeply involved with the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) since 1992, serving as Secretary / Treasurer, Newsletter Editor, Chair, and currently as Past Chair. He received the SIGDA Meritorious Service Award in 1997, the SIGDA Distinguished Service Award in 2006, and the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award in 2007.
He is a Distinguished Member of the ACM, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of ACM/SIGDA, ACM/SIGARCH, ACM/SIGCSE, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and Sigma Xi. He has served on approximately 50 conference steering, organizing, and program committees, including 7 years on the the ICCAD Executive Committee and 4 years on the DAC Executive Committee. He has a strong interest in teaching, and received the Lilly Endowment Teaching Fellowship in 1990 and the Rensselaer Distinguished Teaching Fellowship in 1992.
Dr. Walker's early research interests were in the field of high-level synthesis, in particular the scheduling and design space exploration problems. He wrote two dozen papers on these topics, and was the co-author of Algorithmic and Register-Transfer Level Synthesis: The System Architect's Workbench and A Survey of High-Level Synthesis Systems. Much of this work was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards MIP-9211323, MIP-9423953, and MIP-9796085.
His more recent work has focused on novel architectures for embedded systems. Building on the KSU CS Department's historical strength in parallel computing, he and many of his students have explored the use of associative SIMD computing techniques on FPGAs, demonstrating their suitablity for embedded systems running such applications as data mining, image processing, etc. With another student, he is exploring techniques for improving instruction cache performance in embedded systems.