CS alumnus elected to National Academy of Engineering

In February, alumnus Jingsheng Jason Cong (MS CS ‘87, PhD ‘90) was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering—one of the highest professional distinctions for engineers. Cong, who is a Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, was recognized for pioneering contributions to application-specific programmable logic via innovations in field programmable gate array (FPGA) synthesis.

At UCLA, Cong has led research in electronic design automation, energy-efficient computing, customized computing for big-data applications and highly scalable algorithms. In particular, FPGAs designed by his synthesis algorithms are now key components of the world’s communication and computation infrastructures.

Cong has also founded or co-founded four companies—Aplus Design Technologies, which developed the first commercially available FPGA architecture evaluation tool and physical synthesis tool; AutoESL Design Technologies, which commercialized his research on high-level synthesis; and Neptune Design Automation, which produced the fastest and most scalable FPGA physical design tool of its time. He is currently chairman and chief scientific advisor at Falcon Computing Solutions.

In 2014, Cong received the CS @ ILLINOIS Distinguished Achievement Award. Among his other awards are the Technical Achievement Award from both the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and the IEEE Computer Society. He is also an ACM and IEEE Fellow.

Cong completed his doctoral work at Illinois under the supervision of Professor C.L. David Liu. He is the 10th CS @ ILLINOIS alumnus/a to be elected to NAE.