Brown Engineering Associate Professor Sherief Reda has been named a recipient of a JESOR grant from Egypt's Academy of Scientific Research and Technology. The JESOR grant is a one million Egyptian pound (an equivalent of $120,000) award over two years, which will support Brown's Reda and his collaborator, Professor Mohamed Shalan, at American University in Cairo (AUC) for silicon tape-outs and travel exchanges between Brown and AUC. The proposal is titled, "Open Cloud-based Digital ASIC design Environment".
JESOR means bridges in Arabic, and its goal is to connect Egyptian expatriates with researchers in Egypt. JESOR is one of the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology's initiatives aimed at establishing solid and sustainable bridges of cooperation between Egyptians, inside and outside Egypt. The program started in 1980 and became fully‐funded by the Egyptian government in 1995.
JESOR proposals are submitted by public or private Egyptian organizations aimed at tackling local or societal challenges where some of the tasks will be carried out or supported by Egyptian expatriates in the diaspora. The engagement of Egyptian experts abroad is a must during the implementation phase.
"JESOR is a great program to connect Egyptians across the globe to tackle big challenges in Egypt," said Reda. "I am so excited to work with Professor Shalan on this project, which will lead to a design tool suite that dramatically lowers the cost of silicon tape-outs for designers in developing countries."
Reda's broad research interests cover computer architecture, electronic design automation (EDA), VLSI design and test, and reconfigurable computing. His current research themes include thermal/power sensing, modeling and management for multi-core heterogeneous processors, energy-efficient adaptive system management for servers in datacenters and HPC clusters, low-power approximate and custom computing, and power and variability-aware physical design. After earning his undergraduate and Sc.M. degrees from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Reda received his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of California at San Diego in 2006. He joined the Brown faculty that same year.