Welcome to the
System Level Design Group!


The SLD Group at UT Austin will officially start on January 1st, 2020. Consequently, we are actively looking for smart and passionate students interested in joining us. Areas of particular interest include machine learning, network science, and systems design. For more information look under openings.


Everything we do relates to understanding and harnessing computation and communication in computational, technological, and natural systems. We believe in thinking out-of-the-box and exploring the path not taken to discover new ideas in systems design. Our research areas of interest include, but are not limited to, cyber-physical, embedded, biological, and social applications.

We challenge the status quo by bringing science and engineering approaches together. In particular, we use network science, machine learning and optimization, and hardware prototyping to explore new angles in system design. Our current topics of interest go beyond traditional many-core platforms design and address Internet-of-Things (IoT), edge computing, social sensing, and other emerging areas of high societal relevance.

We illustrate our vision by exploring embedded, biological, and social applications. Our research results are highly visible, widely cited, and consistently funded. Would you like to join us?

Recent Papers

  • K Bhardwaj, C Lin, A Sartor, and R Marculescu. Memory-and Communication-Aware Model Compression for Distributed Deep Learning Inference on IoT. To appear in CODES+ISSS, ES Week, ACM TECS, 2019.
  • Lo, C. and Marculescu, R. MetaNN: Accurate Classification of Host Phenotypes From Metagenomic Data Using Neural Networks, BMC Bioinformatics 20, 314 (2019)
  • A Topirceanu, M Udrescu and R Marculescu Weighted Betweenness Preferential Attachment: A New Mechanism Explaining Social Network Formation and Evolution in Scientific Reports 8, 2018
  • K Bhardwaj and R Marculescu, Dimensionality Reduction via Community Detection in Small Sample Datasets in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series, 2018
  • W Choi, K Duraisamy, RG Kim, JR Doppa, PP Pande, D Marculescu, R Marculescu, On-Chip Communication Network for Efficient Training of Deep Convolutional Networks on Heterogeneous Manycore Systems in IEEE Transactions on Computers Volume: 67, Issue: 5, May 1 2018
  • Recent Talks

  • Keynote talk @ SocialSens 2018 (April 17th, Orlando) here
  • Talk @ Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) (July 12, Orlando) Special Session on Molecular Communication and Networking with Applications to Precision Medicine
  • Recent Press

  • Our paper is featured by the IEEE Transactions on Computers, May 2018 issue: On-Chip Communication Network for Efficient Training of Deep Convolutional Networks on Heterogeneous Manycore Systems

  • 2018 Marculescu receives Kavcic-Moura Professorship: here

  • 2015 Scientific American: A broader understanding of bacterial social networks might help scientists combat antibiotic resistance

  • Recent Awards

  • Marculescu receives the IEEE Computer Society 2019 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award! Read more here
  • Our paper on Wireless NoC and Dynamic VFI Co-Design wins T-VLSI Best Paper Award! ECE News Article Link to Paper


  • Copyright 2020 SLD Group @ UT Austin

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