PhD student Yeonju Ro received the 2024 IBM PhD Fellowship award with an endowment of $40,000.
Through her studies, Ro’s research focuses on AI algorithm-system co-design for scaling out machine learning training and inference and is co-advised by Professor Aditya Akella, and Professor Atlas Wang. Prior to joining UT, she got her Bachelor’s and Master’s in computer science at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Ro also previously worked at Samsung Research On-device Lab on NPU design and model optimization for edge AI.
Ro wrote multiple research publications and presented them at various conferences such as the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
“I was thrilled and deeply honored to receive the fellowship,” Ro said. “It was incredibly rewarding to see my research recognized at this level, especially given the competitive selection process.”
Through the IBM fellowship, Ro will work within the Multi-Cloud Computing and Hybrid Cloud Platforms for AI domain over the 2024-25 academic year.
“I hope this opens a chance to collaborate with IBM research to advance hybrid cloud platforms for AI through co-design, creating more practical and realistic systems,” Ro said.
Ro is also currently participating in the Learning-directed Operating System expedition and is going to join Microsoft Azure System Research Group as a research intern over the summer.
“This fellowship is not just a recognition of my work, but also a validation of the research direction I’m pursuing,” Ro said. “It strengthens my confidence in addressing challenging ML problems through system-algorithm co-design to scale AI systems.”