Ziad Youssfi

Associate Teaching Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Bio

Dr. Ziad Youssfi joined ECE in 2022 as Associate Teaching Professor. He was previously a tenured Associate Professor at Ohio Northern University (ONU), where he taught computer architecture, VLSI, embedded systems, and operating systems. He also created and taught new courses in deep learning and hands-on maker engineering and helped restructure the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science curriculum. Before ONU, he taught at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) and worked on the P6 processor and chipsets at Intel Corporation.

Dr. Youssfi earned his Ph.D. at Michigan State University, developing a new technique for detecting and indexing instruction data dependence to throttle processor power consumption. While working on his Ph.D., he created an enterprise application streamlining the university financial system.

While at ONU, Dr. Youssfi won the 2019 Henry Horldt Outstanding Teacher Award, based on student feedback, and the 2019 Endowed Alter Chair Award, for his service in restructuring the curriculum, by adding hands-on learning and aligning the curriculum with IEEE guidelines. While at UWO, the student council selected him for the 2012 Teaching Honor Roll. While at Intel, he received the Spontaneous Recognition Award for his work on the Pentium Processor chipset. He is an NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute Ambassador and an NVIDIA-certified instructor for Deep Learning and CUDA.

Dr. Youssfi’s latest interests are (1) innovations integrating deep learning, embedded systems, and robotics and (2) hands-on and maker-style learning in electrical and computer engineering. At CMU ECE, he recently developed a project-driven course to help students learn about the exciting new opportunities in embedded machine learning and tinyML. You can find a listing of students’ projects here.

Dr. Youssfi enjoys fine art photography and watercolor painting in his free time. He exhibited his work in local galleries and won multiple awards.

Education

Ph.D., Michigan State University, Electrical & Computer Engineering, 2011, East Lansing, Michigan
Dissertation topic: “Reduced Occupancy for Processor Efficiency through Downsized Out-of-Order Engine and Reduced Traffic Bursts”

M.S., Michigan State University, Electrical & Computer Engineering, East Lansing, Michigan
Concentration: computer architecture, VLSI systems

B.S., Michigan State University, Electrical & Computer Engineering, East Lansing, Michigan
Concentration: digital and analog circuits and solid-state devices