June 20, 2025 Viramontes receives award for communicating research to the public Written By: Jason Daley Departments: Electrical & Computer Engineering Categories: Awards|Graduate Recent ECE PhD graduate Robert Viramontes is a recipient of the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy (WISL) Award for Communicating PhD Research to the Public. The awards are part of an initiative by WISL and the UW-Madison Graduate School, encouraging all UW-Madison PhD candidates to include a chapter in their PhD thesis communicating their research to non-scientists. Robert Viramontes The goal is to explain scholarly research and its significance to a wider audience including family members, friends, civic groups, newspaper reporters, program officers at appropriate funding agencies, state legislators, and members of the U.S. Congress. The awards, open to all PhD students, include a $250 honorarium. Viramontes graduated in 2025 and now works as a senior engineer in the physical design of silicon at Austin, Texas, based Tenstorrent, a company specializing in next generation computer hardware and software. Viramontes was advised by Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor Azadeh Davoodi. His thesis is entitled “Distributing Deep Neural Network Inference Across Edge-Hub-Cloud Systems.” In his chapter for non-scientists, Viramontes explains how deep neural networks, one of the foundations of artificial intelligence, are designed like lasagna. By assigning different lasagna layers to various devices, he found that it’s possible to better control factors like latency and energy use.