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Hai "Helen" Li

Marie Foote Reel E'46 Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering
RM130 Hudson Hall, Box 90291, Durham, NC 27701
#407 Wilkinson Building, 534 Research Drive, Durham, NC 27701
Office hours Appointment by email hai.li@duke.edu  

Overview


Hai (Helen) Li is the Marie Foote Reel E’46 Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. She received her B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University and her Ph.D. from Purdue University. Her research interests include neuromorphic circuits and systems for brain-inspired computing, machine learning acceleration and trustworthy AI, conventional and emerging memory design and architecture, and software and hardware co-design. Dr. Li served/serves as the Associate Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor for multiple IEEE and ACM journals. She was the General Chair or Technical Program Chair of numerous IEEE/ACM conferences and the Technical Program Committee member of over 30 international conference series. Dr. Li is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE CAS Society and a Distinguished Speaker of ACM. Dr. Li is a recipient of the IEEE Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, Ten Year Retrospective Influential Paper Award from ICCAD, TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Fellowship from Germany, ELATE Fellowship, ten best paper awards, and another ten best paper nominations. Dr. Li is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, and NAI.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Marie Foote Reel E'46 Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering · 2024 - Present Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering
Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering · 2020 - Present Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering
Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering · 2022 - Present Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering
Professor of Computer Science · 2020 - Present Computer Science, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published April 8, 2025
Duke Researchers at the Forefront of the Next Generation of Wireless
Published March 25, 2025
Duke Honors 31 New Distinguished Professors
Published January 8, 2025
Two Pratt Faculty Receive Top Honor for Inventors

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Recent Publications


AutoRAC: Automated Processing-in-Memory Accelerator Design for Recommender Systems

Conference Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2025 · June 30, 2025 Full text Cite

QPlacer: Frequency-Aware Component Placement for Superconducting Quantum Computers

Conference Proceedings International Symposium on Computer Architecture · June 21, 2025 Quantum Computers face a critical limitation in qubit numbers, hindering their progression towards large-scale and fault-tolerant quantum computing. A significant challenge impeding scaling is crosstalk, characterized by unwanted interactions among neighbo ... Full text Cite

Ecco: Improving Memory Bandwidth and Capacity for LLMs via Entropy-Aware Cache Compression

Conference Proceedings International Symposium on Computer Architecture · June 21, 2025 Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated transformative capabilities across diverse artificial intelligence applications, yet their deployment is hindered by substantial memory and computational demands, especially in resource-constrained environment ... Full text Cite
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Recent Grants


Center of Neuromorphic Computing under Extreme Environments

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by University of Southern California · 2024 - 2029

DoD Center of Excellence in Advanced Computing and Software (COE-ACS)

ResearchCo-Principal Investigator · Awarded by Georgia State University · 2023 - 2028

PARTNER: Neuro-Inspired AI for the Edge at UTSA (NAIAD)

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by The University of Texas at San Antonio · 2023 - 2027

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Education, Training & Certifications


Purdue University · 2004 Ph.D.