KU computer science cohort wins best student paper at top-tier IEEE symposium
Three graduate students and their faculty advisor from the University of Kansas Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the Institute for Information Sciences (I2S) were recently honored at the 2026 IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), one of the premier conferences in the field of real-time systems.
Doctoral candidates Connor Sullivan, Amin Mamandipoor, and Cole Strickler, along with EECS Professor Heechul Yun, received the Best Student Paper Award for their paper, “Per-Bank Memory Bandwidth Regulation for Predictable and Performant Real-Time Systems.”
The paper addresses the longstanding challenge of bank-level interference in modern dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) used in multicore systems-on-chip (SoCs). The researchers developed a novel per-bank memory bandwidth regulation technique that delivers more than a fivefold performance improvement over existing approaches.
Their work includes extensive experimental analysis of DRAM behavior and demonstrates how current memory architectures can be exploited because memory bandwidth characteristics remain relatively constant across DRAM generations. The team’s solution effectively mitigates these issues while maintaining both predictability and performance. According to the award committee, the paper stood out because of its implementation on a realistic SoC platform and its evaluation using real-world workloads.
The three graduate students are members of Yun’s research group within the Computer Systems Center at I2S.
In addition to the Best Student Paper Award, Yun was honored with the 2026 RTAS Influential Paper Award, presented by the Technical Community on Real-Time Systems (TCRTS) of the IEEE Computer Society. The award recognized a paper he co-authored that proposed the first practical and efficient method for managing highly variable memory bandwidth in multicore processors, enabling reliable real-time analysis on those platforms.
The influential paper was originally published in 2013 while Yun was pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He joined the University of Kansas later that year.
The 32nd annual IEEE RTAS symposium was held May 12–14 in Saint-Malo, France. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity. The mission of I2S is to sustain and expand national leadership in the creation, dissemination, and commercialization of innovations in computer systems, communication systems, and radar systems.