OSCAR Director

  • Dr. Amro Awad

Amro Awad is an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering (Focus on Digital Technologies) at the University of Oxford. He is also a Tutorial Fellow at University College (Univ). His research is focused on architectural innovations to enable secure computing systems.  Before moving to Oxford, he led the Secure and Advanced Computer Architecture (SACA) research group at NC State as a tenured Associate Professor. Besides academic experience, he had several industrial stints at HP Labs, AMD Research, and MediaTek USA. He also worked at US government labs, including Los Alamos National Lab, Sandia National Laboratories, and Air Force Research Labs. Amro has 9 granted U.S. patents (as of April 2024), has been inducted to the prestigious IEEE TCCA HPCA Hall of Fame, and has been an Associate Editor (since Feb. 2024) of the ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO). His team's research outcomes were featured in the top conferences in computer architecture and nominated for best paper awards (e.g., IEEE/ACM MICRO'23, IEEE VR'22, ACM ICS'21). He is a recipient of the Bennett Faculty Fellowship (2023) and Goodnight Early Career (2023) awards. He served as a PC chair and General Chair of major conferences such as IEEE ICCD'22 and IEEE IISWC'19, respectively. 

His work identified challenges for efficiently enabling secure memory with emerging NVM technologies (Osiris@MICRO'18, Anubis@ISCA'19, Triad-NVM@ISCA'19, Dolos@MICRO'21, Horus@MICRO'22, Toth@HPCA'23), devised the first security work arguing for reduced overhead implementations through authenticating memory devices (ObfusMem@ISCA'17), cryptographic memory data shredding (SilentShredder@ASPLOS'16), cryptographic access control (CryptoMMU@MICRO'23), bandwidth-efficient GPU memory security (Plutus@HPCA'23, Salus@HPCA'24), and efficient security and access control for disaggregated memory systems (Minerva@IPDPS'22, DeACT@HPCA'21). Finally, and perhaps what he is most proud of as a product, he trained to completion five excellent PhD students and two post-doctoral scholars (as of July 2024).
 

Current OSCAR Members

Post-Doctoral Research Associates

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DPhil (i.e. PhD) Students

  • Rahaf Abdullah (PhD Candidate @NCSU), co-advised with Professor Huiyang Zhou (NCSU)
  • Debpratim Adak (PhD Candidate @NCSU), co-advised with Professor Eric Rotenberg (NCSU) and Professor Huiyang Zhou (NCSU)
  • John McFarland (PhD Student @NCSU), co-advised with Professor Aydin Aysu (NCSU)

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MSc (Res) Students

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Visiting Scholars

  • Lukas Zink (ETH), summer 2024

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Previous Members

DPhil/PhD Graduates

  • Dr. Xijing Han, 2024 (First employment: GPU Architect at Apple)
  • Dr. Kazi Zubair, 2023 (First employment: CPU Architect at Intel)
  • Dr. Vamsee Reddy, 2021 (First employment: Researcher at AMD Research)
  • Dr. Mazen Alwadi, 2021 (First employment: Assistant Professor at Jordan University of Science and Technology)
  • Dr. Mao Ye, 2020 (First employment: Senior Silicon Design Engineer at AMD)

MSc (with thesis) Graduates

  • Mr. Shubham Nema, 2023 (first employment: Senior Research Engineer at Samsung Research)

Post-Doctoral Scholars

  • Dr. Hyokeun Lee, 2023 - 2024 (First employment: Assistant Professor at Ajou University, South Korea)
  • Dr. Seetal Potluri (co-advised with Dr. Aysu), 2022-2023 (First employment:  Assistant Professor at University at Albany)