Stefan Abi-Karam

I am a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering under my advisor Prof. Cong (Callie) Hao as part of Sharc Lab.

In my Ph.D., I work on AI for hardware design and EDA, with a focus on FPGA and high-level synthesis (HLS) design flows. My research includes creating large-scale HLS/HDL datasets, benchmarking LLMs for hardware code generation, and integrating LLMs into HLS and FPGA design tools.

I am also a full-time research faculty at Georgia Tech through Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) within the Cybersecurity, Information, Communication, Command and Control and Software Systems (CIPHER) lab division.

My roles give me the rare distinction of being both a Ph.D. student and a research faculty member at the same time at Georgia Tech!

Contact

Email - [email protected]

GitHub - github.com/stefanpie

LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/stefanabikaram

Google Scholar - https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=y1QO9ooAAAAJ

Publications

• FIFOAdvisor: A DSE Framework for Automated FIFO Sizing of High-Level Synthesis Designs
  Stefan Abi-Karam, Rishov Sarkar, Samir Basalama, Jason Cong, Cong Hao
  [2026-01-15] | Conference: ASP-DAC 2026 |
• HLS-Eval: A Benchmark and Framework for Evaluating LLMs on High-Level Synthesis Design Tasks
  Stefan Abi-Karam, Cong Hao
  [2025-06-26] | Conference: ICLAD 2025 | Link 1 |
• HLSFactory: A Framework Empowering High-Level Synthesis Datasets for Machine Learning and Beyond
  Stefan Abi-Karam*, Rishov Sarkar*, Allison Seigler, Sean Lowe, Zhigang Wei, Hanqiu Chen, Nanditha Rao, Lizy John, Aman Arora, Cong Hao
  [2024-03-11] | Conference: MLCAD 2024 | Link 1 |
• INR-Arch: A Dataflow Architecture and Compiler for Arbitrary-Order Gradient Computations in Implicit Neural Representation Processing
  Stefan Abi-Karam*, Rishov Sarkar*, Dejia Xu, Zhiwen Fan, Zhangyang Wang, Cong Hao
  [2023-10-29] | Conference: ICCAD 2023 | Link 1 |
• GNNBuilder: An Automated Framework for Generic Graph Neural Network Accelerator Generation, Simulation, and Optimization
  Stefan Abi-Karam, Cong Hao
  [2023-09-04] | Conference: FPL 2023 | Link 1 |
• M5: Multi-modal Multi-Task Model Mapping on Multi-FPGA with Accelerator Configuration Search
  Akshay Karkal Kamath, Stefan Abi-Karam, Ashwin Bhat, Cong Hao
  [2023-04-17] | Conference: DATE 2023 | Link 1 |
• FlowGNN: A Dataflow Architecture for Real-Time Workload-Agnostic Graph Neural Network Inference
  Rishov Sarkar, Stefan Abi-Karam, Yuqi He, Lakshmi Sathidevi, Cong Hao
  [2023-02-25] | Conference: HPCA 2023 | Link 1 |
• GenGNN: A Generic FPGA Framework for Graph Neural Network Acceleration
  Stefan Abi-Karam*, Yuqi He*, Rishov Sarkar*, Lakshmi Sathidevi, Zihang Qiao, Cong Hao
  [2022-01-20] | Preprint: Arxiv | Link 1 |

Teaching

• Parallel Programming for FPGAs - ECE 8893
  Guest Lecturer: Delivered guest lecture on real-world applications of high-level synthesis (HLS) for FPGAs, mainly HLS datasets for deep learning.
  [Spring 2025] | Georgia Institute of Technology | Link 1 |
• Advanced Computer Architecture - ECE 6100 / ECE 4100 / CS 4290 / CS 6290
  Guest Lecturer: Delivered two guest lectures on Network-on-Chip (NoC) fundamentals, architectures, and applications.
  [Fall 2023] | Georgia Institute of Technology | Link 1 |
• Parallel Programming for FPGAs - ECE 8893
  Guest Lecturer: Delivered guest lecture on real-world applications of high-level synthesis (HLS) for FPGAs, mainly deep learning accelerator.
  [Spring 2023] | Georgia Institute of Technology | Link 1 |

Honors and Awards

• FPL Community Award
  [2023] | 33rd International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) |
• MLCAD Distinguished Artifact Award Nomination
  [2024] | 6th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Machine Learning for CAD |
• MLCAD Best Paper Award
  [2024] | 6th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Machine Learning for CAD |
• GTRI IRAD of the Year Finalist / 2nd Place / Small IRAD Category
  [2024] | Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) |
• Recipient of the Georgia Tech "Warren Batts and Austin Brown Innovation Award" VIP Scholarship
  [2020-03-30] | Georgia Tech |
• 3rd Place Oral Presentation
  [2019-04-09] | The Georgia Tech Undergraduate Research Symposium |

Service

• Member | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• Member | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Co-Organizer for the Computer Architecture Research Seminar (CARS) held weekly at Georgia Tech, Spring 2025
• Local Area Chair for The 34th IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) 2026