The iCAS Lab Ph.D. students, Md Hasibul Amin and MohammadReza Mohammadi have received the Best Poster Award at the GLSCLSI 2025 Conference—a premier venue for disseminating research in VLSI, devices, and system-level design. Earlier this year, this work also earned second place at the CSE Research Symposium.

This is a collaborative work between Dr. Ramtin Zand's lab and Dr. Jason Bakos on a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

"CrossNAS: A Cross-Layer Neural Architecture Search Framework for PIM Systems", by  Md Hasibul Amin, MohammadReza Mohammadi, Jason Bakos, and Ramtin Zand. 

Abstract: This work introduces the CrossNAS framework, an automated approach for exploring a vast, multidimensional search space that spans various design abstraction layers—circuits, architecture, and systems—to optimize the deployment of machine learning workloads on analog processing-in-memory (PIM) systems. CrossNAS leverages the single-path one-shot weight-sharing strategy combined with the evolutionary search for the first time in the context of PIM system mapping and optimization. CrossNAS sets a new benchmark for PIM neural architecture search (NAS), outperforming previous methods in both accuracy and energy efficiency while maintaining comparable or shorter search times.

We are proud to announce that Dr. Christian O'Reilly has received an NSF CAREER Award for his project titiled "Multiscale Model-Driven Analysis of the Brain and its Disorders." He is looking forward to kicking off this project and raising the prominence of Computational Neuroscience at the College and at USC.

For the second year in a row, iCAS Lab has won the First Place Award in the University Demonstration competition at the DAC, The Chips to Systems Conference, recognized as the premier global event for chips to systems!

This year’s award-winning project was "PiCASo: Pi-Integrated Conversational AI for Social-Robot with. Optimized LLMS" led by Mahsa Ardakani and co-presented by herself and Jinendra Malekar, with contributions from Peyton Chandarana — all PhD students at the iCAS Lab directed by Dr. Ramtin Zand.

PiCASo is a fully integrated, voice-to-voice Conversational AI system that runs 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 on a Raspberry Pi 5. It combines:

• Whisper for speech recognition
• Quantized LLMs for question-answering
• Piper for text-to-speech synthesis

Mahsa and Jinendra applied various post-training quantization (PTQ) strategies — including W2A8, W4A8, W6A8, W8A8 — for Gemma-2B, LLaMA-3B, Phi-3B, and LLaMA-8B, and utilized quantization-aware trained (QAT) BitNet models with Ternary weights and 8-bit activations to enable real-time, offline inference on resource-constrained hardware. This makes PiCASo ideal for education, accessibility, and other embedded AI applications.

Our work on LLM quantization was also presented at the 2025 IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, and the paper is now available in the CVPR 2025 proceedings. "LLMPi: Optimizing LLMs for High-Throughput on Raspberry Pi". repo

Congratulations to the following CSE recipients of the ASPIRE-AI awards.

• Francisco Leon Oyala (PI, Pharamacology) and Agostinelli (Co-I), “ASPIRE-AI: Towards Affordable HIV Treatment: Discovering Cheaper Synthesis Paths for HIV Drugs with Artificial Intelligence”
• Agostinelli (PI) and Fu (Co-I), "Efficient Quantum Algorithm Compilation with Machine Learning and Heuristic Search"
• Hu (PI), "Generative AI for Data-driven Design of Sulfur Cathode Materials for Next-Generation Batteries"
• Srivastava (PI), "SafeGenChat: A Novel and General Approach for Building Risk-Aware Collaborative Assistants for Trust-sensitive Applications "
• Valafar (Co-I), "AI-Powered Modeling of Cytoplasmic Microviscosity as a Function of RNA Composition"
• Zand and Valafar (Co-I's), "Decoding Alzheimer’s Disease and Advancing AI in Biomedical Research"

In addition, one of our students, Vandana Srivastava, who is now affiliated with the University Libraries, has received funding as the PI.

We congratulate our faculty who received the following research awards:

• Christian O'Reilly, "Neonatal autonomic nervous system dysfunction as a predictor of autism spectrum disorder in preterm infants", (NIMH)/NIH, and "Cholinergic regulation of amygdalar circuits in emotional memory", (NIMH)/NIH.
• Biplav Srivastava,  "Demonstrating a Compact Foundation Model for Planning-Like(PL) Tasks for Next Generation Trusted Applications", NSF.

Ph.D. students, from Dr. Sanjib Sur's lab,  Zhuangzhuang Gu, Hem Regmi, and Reza Tavasoli, and Ryan Titus (USC Med Student, presenter) won the second place award at 2025 Discover USC Medical Scholar poster session.

We would like to announce the receipt of the following grants in the new year. Congratulations to everyone!

Pooyan Jamshidi, "Modular Performance Modeling and Analysis for Multi-Component Distributed ML Systems", Carnegie Mellon University/NSF.

Ramtin Zand: "Precision Processing of Autonomous Maritime Perception System Data - Phase III", Office of Naval Research (ONR)/DOD. Also "Advanced Perception for Autonomous Platforms in the Littorals", Office of Naval Research (ONR)/DOD.

Homayoun Valafar,  "South Carolina IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (SC INBRE) - Bioinformatics Core (BIPP) - Year 5 of 5", National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH. Also "SC IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research (SC INBRE): Increasing Data Science Capacity", National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH

The iCAS Lab, directed by Dr. Ramtin Zand, has just published an outreach audiobook on the science communication channel, SciPod! 

The audiobook highlights a recently awarded NSF CAREER project: "Heterogeneous Neuromorphic and Edge Computing Systems for Realtime Machine Learning Technologies." Tailored for a general audience, it emphasizes the potential broader impacts of the research, particularly in real-time sign language translation.

The audiobook is available on all major streaming services. We invite you to listen and reach out to Dr. Zand at ramtin@cse.sc.edu if you are interested in collaborating to advance real-time AI and ML technologies for assistive applications and beyond! The iCAS Lab is also looking to recruit undergraduate research assistants for this exciting project!

Link to Audiobook: Dr Ramtin Zand | A Hybrid System for Real-Time Sign Language Translation • scipod.global

Computer science doctoral candidate Aakriti Adhikari is making this technology a reality through her dissertation. With next generation wireless networks looking to merge high-speed data connectivity with sensing, Adhikari’s work focuses on reconfiguring existing 5G and beyond at-home networking devices with sensing capabilities to enable healthcare applications. Read full article here.

Computer Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Forest Agostinelli has received a nearly $350,000, three-year National Science Foundation grant to study the use of heuristic (experimental) search and machine learning to solve complex pathfinding problems. Agostinelli’s project is expected to advance artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that solve problems faster or find approximate solutions. Read full article here.