Albonesi receives distinguished teaching award

David H. Albonesi, Professor and Associate Director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received the Ralph S. Watts ’72 Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Engineering. This is the highest award for teaching in the College. Nominated by faculty from the School, Albonesi was selected by a committee comprised of former teaching prizewinners from within the College of Engineering.

Albonesi joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Computer Systems Laboratory at Cornell in 2004 after serving on the faculty of the University of Rochester. His current research interests include adaptive and reconfigurable multi-core and processor architectures, power- and reliability-aware computing, and energy-efficient smart buildings. In addition to his academic experience, he has ten years of industry experience as a technical manager, computer architect, and chip designer at IBM and Prime Computer.

Albonesi is a Fellow of the IEEE and has received the NSF CAREER Award, three IBM Faculty Awards, three IEEE Micro Top Picks paper awards, the Michael Tien '72 Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Ruth and Joel Spira Excellence in Teaching Award.

His MOOC, The Computing Technology Inside Your Smartphone, first launched on CornellX (EdX) in March 2015. He was chosen by Cornell to be one of 5 MOOCs developed last year. He used the material he developed for his intro course on Modern Computing Devices as the basis of the course.  Over several months he wrote out lectures, taped them, edited the course work, interviewed special guests, and made this more than just a series of videonote lectures.  Ninety-three percent of those surveyed recommend it to someone else, and who for the most part rated the workload, pace, and content as ‘just right”.  This was a great outreach, and will have broad impact outside of Cornell.