Lisa Wills

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Appointments and Affiliations

• Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Contact Information

• Office Location: D304 Lsrc, 308 Research Drive, Durham, NC 27708
• Email Address: lisa.wills@duke.edu
• Websites:
  • APEX Lab @ Duke | Application-driven Programmable Efficient Accelerated Systems Lab
  • Lisa Wu Wills | Assistant Professor @ Duke

Education

• Ph.D. Columbia University, 2014

Research Interests

I enjoy solving difficult problems surrounding computations with the goal to process large volumes of data efficiently. My research interests include computer architecture and microarchitecture, hardware-software co-designs, accelerators, and emerging application domains ― especially those in big data analytics such as genomics, graphs, and databases. One of my research goals is to greatly simplify the design, deployment, and usage of custom hardware and to leverage this research in hardware acceleration to advance state-of-the-art research in the healthcare domain as well as other natural sciences.

Courses Taught

• COMPSCI 210D: Introduction to Computer Systems
• COMPSCI 550: Advanced Computer Architecture I
• COMPSCI 590: Advanced Topics in Computer Science
• ECE 494: Projects in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• ECE 552: Advanced Computer Architecture I
• ECE 590: Advanced Topics in Electrical and Computer Engineering

In the News

• New Faculty, Bold Thinking (Oct 15, 2019 | Duke Stories)

Representative Publications

• Xu, C; Kjellqvist, C; Wills, LW, SNS's not a Synthesizer: A Deep-Learning-Based Synthesis Predictor, Proceedings International Symposium on Computer Architecture (2022), pp. 847-859 [10.1145/3470496.3527444] [abs].
• Robson, E; Xu, C; Wills, LW, Prose: The architecture and design of a protein discovery engine, International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems Asplos (2022), pp. 655-668 [10.1145/3503222.3507722] [abs].
• Ang, P; Dhingra, B; Wills, LW, Characterizing the Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off for Long-Context NLP Models, Nlp Power 2022 1st Workshop on Efficient Benchmarking in Nlp, Proceedings of the Workshop (2022), pp. 113-121 [abs].
• Ham, TJ; Lee, Y; Seo, SH; Song, UG; Lee, JW; Bruns-Smith, D; Sweeney, B; Asanovic, K; Oh, YH; Wills, LW, Accelerating Genomic Data Analytics with Composable Hardware Acceleration Framework, Ieee Micro, vol 41 no. 3 (2021), pp. 42-49 [10.1109/MM.2021.3072385] [abs].
• Wills, LW; Swaminathan, K, Guest Editorial: IEEE TC Special Issue on Domain-Specific Architectures for Emerging Applications, Ieee Transactions on Computers, vol 69 no. 8 (2020), pp. 1096-1098 [10.1109/TC.2020.3002674] [abs].