EECS Researchers Honored with Top Awards at IEEE RTAS 2026

A paper co-authored by KU EECS Ph.D. student Connor Sullivan and his peers in Professor Heechul Yun's lab won Best Student Paper at IEEE RTAS 2026, the top venue in embedded real-time systems. Their paper, "Per-Bank Memory Bandwidth Regulation for Predictable and Performant Real-Time Systems," addresses bank-level interference in modern DRAMs and presents an innovative regulator that achieves over 5x improvement versus competing methods. The committee noted that implementation on a realistic SoC with real-world workloads made this paper truly stand out.

Professor Heechul Yun Receives 2026 RTAS Influential Paper Award

Professor Heechul Yun also received the 2026 RTAS Influential Paper Award from the IEEE Computer Society's TCRTS for his 2013 paper "MemGuard," published while he was a Ph.D. student at UIUC. The award recognizes the first practical method to tame variable memory bandwidth in multi-core processors, enabling real-time analysis on such platforms. Professor Yun joined KU in the fall of the same year this influential work was published.

A Thriving Hub for Real-Time Systems Research

These dual recognitions underscore the EECS department's growing prominence in embedded and real-time systems. Our faculty provide students with mentorship and resources to solve hard, industry-relevant problems on realistic hardware. We congratulate Connor, his co-authors, and Professor Yun for advancing the frontier of reliable, high-performance computing at KU.