CSE graduate students George Viamontes and Kai-hui Chang captured 2nd place in the 2006 CADathlon, an all-day programming competition organized at the Int'l Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) by the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA). Calling themselves the iCAD team, they worked from 8am to 5pm to solve six problems in formal verification, logic synthesis, error-correcting codes, Steiner-tree heuristics, circuit timing analysis, and clock skew optimization. The contest was sponsored by IBM, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Magma, and Altera.

Kai-hui Chang is a PhD candidate in Computer Science & Engineering. His current research interests include verification and physical synthesis. His advisors are Professors Markov and Bertacco.

George F. Viamontes is a PhD candidate in Computer Science & Engineering. He is working to develop algorithms that exploit implicit problem structure to simulate quantum-mechanical phenomena efficiently and has done some of this research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM. His advisors are Professors Markov and Hayes.