Abraham Addisie awarded Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement

Abraham Addisie, a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering, has been awarded the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement by the College of Engineering. This prize is presented to an outstanding graduate student in each degree program. The criteria considered include the student’s active participation in research, leadership, and academic performance.

Addisie works with Thurnau Professor Valeria Bertacco, and his work focuses on domain-specific architectures for data-intensive applications.

Specifically, Addisie works on boosting the performance and energy efficiency of big-data applications. These application domains are becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of applications ranging from traffic and road networks to social networks, DNA sequencing, and beyond.

Addisie solves the challenge by devising specialized and distributed hardware units that augment contemporary processors’ capabilities in these domains. His solutions tackle bottlenecks that conventional memory hierarchies experience when storing large datasets, leading to poor performance and high transfer latencies. Addisie’s solutions explore the memory access patterns common in emerging application domains, such as graph analytics, to identify opportunities and leverage them for optimizations.

Addisie holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Since joining University of Michigan for his PhD study, he has maintained a strong tie with his alma mater. Over the years, Addisie has mentored several undergraduate and graduate students by traveling to Ethiopia in the Summers of 2016 and 2018 as a part of the University of Michigan’s broader collaboration efforts with various institutes in Ethiopia.