Remembering Elaine Cohen
Elaine Cohen, a Kahlert School of Computing emeritus faculty member passed away on October 19, 2025.
Elaine served 47 years as a faculty member, publishing seminal research in her field, collecting prestigious awards, co-founding a company, leading numerous committees for professional societies and government agencies, and striving to bring underrepresented groups into computer science.
Elaine was the first woman in the College of Engineering to get tenure in 1985. In 2021, she was honored as the first woman from the college to earn the top rank of distinguished professor.
Elaine's work focused on modeling, graphics, and visualization problems that require geometric computation and analysis. She received her bachelor’s from Vassar College and her master’s and doctorate from Syracuse University, all in mathematics. She joined the University of Utah in 1974 as a research assistant professor, eventually rising to full professor in 1991. She earned numerous accolades for her work, including being named a Solid Modeling Association Fellow and Pioneer, and winning their top Bézier Award.
Elaine is survived by Richard Riesenfeld, her husband of 51 years, her daughters Samantha Riesenfeld (spouse Lorenzo Orecchia) and Rebecca Dannels (spouse Joseph Dannels), grandchildren Elia Orecchia, Ari Orecchia, Joaquin Dannels, and Kyle Dannels, “grand-dogs” (Elaine’s term) Zuma and Maggie, and a close, wonderfully supportive, extended family. Elaine was preceded in death by her parents and her sister Rosalind Meskin.
A memorial service will be held in December, details of which are forthcoming.
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/millcreek-ut/elaine-cohen-12569480
Zhao Fuheng
Fuheng Zhao
Assistant Professor
Joining July 2026
Research Interests
Databases and distributed systems
Gillespie Mark
Mark Gillespie
Assistant Professor
Joining July 2026
Research Interests
Computer graphics and discrete differential geometry
Distinguished Colloquium - Daniel Kroening
Thursday, September 11, 2025
Kennecott Mechanical Engineering Building (MEK)
Room 3550
5:15pm - lecture
AI Accelerators 1010
Abstract
LLMs are arguably among the largest technology investments since the moon landing, and rely on custom hardware accelerators both for training and inference.
The talk will cover accelerating LLM transformer architectures using the combination of a compiler and a systolic compute array. The key enabler to achieving meaningful performance using the systolic compute array are deep program analyses of the model architecture in the Neuron Compiler. I will briefly report on our effort to build a verified (using Lean) compiler from XLA/HLO to the Trainium ISA.
BIO
Daniel Kroening is a Senior Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon, where he works on the correctness of the Neuron Compiler for distributed training and inference. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and is the co-founder of Diffblue Ltd., a University spinout that develops Al that targets code and code-like artefacts. He wrote the CBMC (for C), JBMC (for Java) and EBMC (for SystemVerilog) model checkers; CBMC is the engine of Kani (for verifying unsafe Rust).
He has received the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Inventor Recognition Award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Microsoft Research SEIF Award, the Wolfson Research Merit Award, and the Rance Cleaveland Test-of-Time tool award. He serves on the CAV steering committee and was co-chair of FLOC 2018, EiC of Springer FMSD, and is co-author of the textbooks on Decision Procedures and Model Checking.
Jiang Yue
Yue Jiang
Assistant Professor
MEB 3142
Research Interests
HCI, Computer vision, deep learning
