Coskun Named Circuit Cellar’s First Female Columnist
Assistant Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE) was named the first female columnist for Circuit Cellar. The monthly magazine that publishes articles pertaining to embedded systems and programming initially reached out to Coskun for a Q&A session in its July 2012 issue. Pleased with the in-depth knowledge of the NSF CAREER Award winner, the editors contacted her again last spring to offer a permanent position.
Editor-in-Chief C. J. Abate said that because the magazine is international, he believed Coskun, who has professional and educational experience in the US, Switzerland and Turkey, would be a good fit. “I’m always looking for contributions from talented, engaging engineers and academics who are working on cutting-edge technologies, such as green computing, thermal management and many-core systems,” Abate added. The magazine’s needs aligned with Coskun’s main research focus – energy-efficient computing.
Coskun was eager to begin. “This opportunity allows me to communicate research ideas, practical implementation aspects of research problems and solutions to engineering problems we come across in my lab to a general engineering and embedded systems audience,” she said.
So far Coskun has enjoyed the change of pace. As opposed to writing technical articles that involve solving open-ended problems specific to research communities, the columns enable her to connect aspects of her work to real-world problems in order to reach a broader audience. In her first column, Coskun discussed how one can build ‘leakage-power aware’ cooling control strategies to save energy and demonstrated an example implementation on a commercial server. It was only after Coskun wrote her first column that she discovered she was the first female columnist in a magazine with a 25-year history.
Noting that one of the magazine’s main goals is to inspire a wider, more diverse audience, Abate expects Coskun’s work to be an inspiration for young engineers and academics. To add value to Circuit Cellar, Coskun plans to emphasize practical aspects while discussing solutions to energy efficiency problems. She looks forward to receiving feedback from readers to better understand their expectations and interests.