Dr. Nikolaos Temenos receives the 2nd ECE-NTUA Iakovos Giourounlian Prize for the year 2023
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Nikolaos A. Temenos has been awarded the 2nd ECE-NTUA Iakovos Giourounlian Prize for the year 2023 for his PhD dissertation “Stochastic Computing Architectures for Information Processing Systems”, recognized for its outstanding scientific contributions with significant industrial relevance.
Dr. Nikolaos A. Temenos received his PhD in 2023 from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), under the supervision of Professor Paul-Peter Sotiriadis. He also holds an MSc in Microelectronics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), 2017, and a BSc in Computer Systems Engineering from the Piraeus University of Applied Sciences (PUAS), 2015. In his dissertation, Dr. Temenos developed several novel digital signal processing architectures that realize arithmetic operations and non-linear functions within the context of Stochastic Computing, a bit-wise processing technique used in the field of Unconventional Computing. The main contributions of his dissertation span theoretical, design, and application levels. From a theoretical perspective, the operation of the architectures is explained in detail using Stochastic Finite-State Machines, enabling further mathematical modeling through Markov Chains. At the design level, the architectures enable the formation of cascaded processing structures, making them suitable for direct computations that overcome existing scaling challenges. In terms of applications, the developed structures are used to realize a variety of processing blocks, including blurring, sharpening, and de-noising filters in the field of image processing; finite impulse response (FIR) filters in the frequency domain; and, finally, down-sampling filters, artificial neurons, and multi-layer perceptrons within the field of artificial neural networks.
The results and findings of Dr. Temenos’ dissertation were published in seven prestigious international peer-reviewed journals, including IEEE JETCAS, TCAD, TCAS II, and TVLSI, and have been presented at multiple IEEE conferences. Additionally, Dr. Temenos’ work has served as the basis for special sessions organized within IEEE conferences and a special issue in IEEE JETCAS. For his contributions to the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), Dr. Temenos was the recipient of the 2022 IEEE JETCAS Best Reviewer Award.
