Ming Gong
First-year ECE PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Ken Mai, working on digital VLSI and computer architecture. B.S. in Computer Engineering from Columbia University.
Research
I’m interested in the intersection of circuit design and low-level systems: how hardware is built, how it fails, and how it interacts with software.
Current · VLSI Design Group, CMU
Hardware Fault Injection in YOLOv8
Which bit flips silently break object detection, and which layers to protect.
Embedded FPGA Routing
Heterogeneous eFPGA architectures and more efficient routing fabrics.
Interests
IC Design
Digital and analog IC, from transistors to RTL-to-GDS
Hardware Acceleration
Custom accelerators on FPGAs, and the cores they sit next to
Systems Programming
Drivers, kernels, and the software layer that talks to real hardware
Before
- 2026CircuitSim: an FPGA circuit simulation accelerator
B.A. thesis · Simon's Rock · Prof. Michael Bergman, Prof. Stephen Edwards - 2026Continuous vital signs monitoring with a loose T-shirt
MobiDx '26 · Prof. Xia Zhou, Columbia - 2025Earth's inner core structure via ultrasonic scattering
Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors · Prof. Michael Bergman, Simon's Rock - 2025Deep learning for thin-film grain boundary detection
Yale Undergraduate Research Conference · Prof. Katayun Barmak, Columbia - 2024Machine learning for pure component property estimation
Engineering · Prof. Xi Chen, Zhejiang University
More details, posters, and reports are in the research section.
Teaching
I like to master hard and interesting classes, and pass on my knowledge to others.
- 2026
- 2026TA, CSEE 4840 Embedded Systems, Columbia
- 2025Head TA, CSEE 3827 Fundamentals of Computer Systems, Columbia · study guides
- 2022–24Think Tank drop-in tutor, Simon's Rock · archived materials
Personal
- I am a roadgeek. I'm a fan of roads, buses, trains (and their connections). I love long road trips and bus rides as a way to unwind.
- I was a PvZ YouTuber, still playing casually from time to time.
- I love archiving. I keep records of my old files, and it is always fun to look back at them. This website serves my purpose well too!