Smart4Women

Event co-located to ISVLSI 2025, organized by members of the SMART4Women Advisory Board. The event with the title “Empowering Women in Hardware & Chip Design: Challenges & Success Stories” aims to highlight success stories of women in engineering—from industry, academia, and entrepreneurship—and foster discussions on the challenges women face in the field and strategies to overcome them.

What to expect: keynote talks, personal insights, and a panel discussion, offering a platform for knowledge exchange, networking, and inspiration for the next generation of women engineers

Design with vision, scale with purpose, live with intention

Laia Domingo

Laia Domingo


Chief Science Officer at Ingenii
New York

Short CV:

Dr. Laia Domingo is Chief Science Officer at Ingenii and a researcher in quantum machine learning, with a PhD from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. She develops practical quantum solutions for life sciences, focusing on applications in drug discovery and biomedical research. Her work spans quantum reservoir computing, hybrid neural networks, and machine learning for quantum systems, with over 15 publications in the field. She also teaches postgraduate courses at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, aiming to make quantum technologies accessible and impactful.

Digital Water for Sustainability and/or Co-Existing using Digital Water for Life on our Mother Earth

Jyoti_Gautam

Jyoti Gautam


Associate Professor, CSE Department, Sharda University
Delhi

Short CV:

Dr. Jyoti Gautam is a distinguished expert in IoT and analytics for a sustainable society, currently serving as the Chair of the IWA-Digital Water India Subgroup and a Steering Committee Member of the IWA Digital Water Program since 2022 till date. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Sharda University, India, with over two decades of academic and research experience. Dr. Gautam holds a B.E. from Netaji Subhas University of Technology, an M.E. from Delhi Technological University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Gautam Buddha University, specializing in the Semantic Web. Her research focuses on Digital Water, Smart Systems, Data Analytics, AI, and Machine Learning, contributing to the development of innovative solutions for water management and climate resilience. She has been a Visiting Researcher at the University of Calcutta and has collaborated with institutions like CDAC and Christ University. A recipient of the "Exceptional Women of Excellence" award at the Women Economic Forum, she has also served as a keynote speaker at international conferences, including IEEE and IWA events. She has reviewed major publications, authored white papers on digital water, and holds a granted Indian patent in water conservation. As the State President of the Delhi Artificial Intelligence Council (WICCI), she actively engages in policy discussions and skill development. Dr. Gautam has been invited by global organizations, including Infosys Consulting, the British High Commission, and UNESCO, to discuss ethical AI and digital transformation. With extensive contributions to academia, research, and industry collaborations, she continues to drive impactful initiatives in digital water and sustainable technology solutions.

Paths to Full Professorship in Germany

Diana Goehringer

Diana Goehringer


Professor, TU Dresden
Germany

Short CV:

Diana Göhringer is professor and holds the Chair of Adaptive Dynamic Systems at Technische Universität Dresden since 2017. She received her PhD (summa cum laude) in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2011. She is author and co-author of over 200 publications in international journals, conferences and workshops. Additionally, she serves as technical program committee member in several international conferences and workshops (e.g. DATE, ICCAD, FPL). She is reviewer and guest editor of several international journals. Her research interests include reconfigurable computing, domain-specific computing architectures, hardware accelerators, networks-on-chip, simulators/virtual platforms, hardware–software codesign and runtime systems.

Do what interests you and don't let anyone tell you that you can't do something

Tanja Harbaum

Tanja Harbaum


Dr.-Ing., Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Germany Team leader

Short CV:

Tanja Harbaum studied Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), focusing on computer architectures and robotics. Following graduation, she worked on high-energy physics experiments involving trigger systems with extreme latency requirements and researche reconfigurable microarchitectures. She completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering at KIT, and has been a team leader at the “Institut fuer Technik der Informationsverarbeitung” (ITIV) since 2019. Her research focuses on designing novel computer architectures and artificial intelligence for embedded systems. A particular focus is on hardware/software co-design, which enables fast and efficient AI execution on embedded systems. She is active in several conferences, including serving as Technical Program Chair for the IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC) and as a TPC member for the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE).

Moore’s law scales transistors – but not opportunities for women Let us redesign

Kousalya Nagakarthick

Kousalya Nagakarthick


Technical Leader, Renesas Electronics | Board Member, HighTechHighHeels-SV | STEM Advocate
Munich

Short CV:

With over 20 years of global experience in semiconductor design and leadership, Kousalya Nagakarthick is the technical lead for backend for state-of the art IOT SOCs at Renesas. She has held pivotal roles at Texas Instruments, LSI Logic, and GlobalFoundries, specializing in power integrity, physical design, low power design and 22nm FDSOI technology. As the Head of Initiatives at Renesas Women in Tech (WIT) and a Board Member of HighTechHighHeels-SV, Kousalya is a passionate advocate for diversity and STEM outreach. Her work bridges technical innovation with community impact, empowering the next generation engineers worldwide.

Bridging Worlds: My Journey from Industry to Academia

Cristina Silvano

Cristina Silvano


Professor of Computer Architectures
Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Short CV:

Cristina Silvano is a Full Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where she is the Chair of the Research Area on Computer Science and Engineering. In 2022, she was promoter of the master degree in HPC Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where she teaches the course on Advanced Computer Architectures. Currently, she is the leader of the flagship project on Hardware Accelerators of the Italian National Research Center for High Performance Computing. She has been Scientific Coordinator of three European research projects (ANTAREX, 2PARMA and MULTICUBE). Her research activities are in the areas of computer architecture and electronic design automation, with focus on design space exploration of energy-efficient accelerators for deep neural networks and application autotuning for high-performance computing. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, six books, and some patents. Since 2017, she is an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to energy-efficient computer architectures.

Organization

General Chairs:
Nikolaos Voros, University of Peloponnese, Greece
Michael Huebner, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany
TPC Chairs:
Georgios Keramidas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Paraskevas Kitsos, University of Peloponnese, Greece
Diana Goehringer, Technical University of Dresden, Germany
Steering Committee:
Juergen Becker (chair)
Saraju Mohanty (vice-chair)
Hai (Helen)Li
Lionel Torres
Michael Hübner
Nikolaos Voros
Ricardo Reis
Sandip Kundu
Sanjukta Bhanja
Susmita Sur-Kolay
Theocharis Theocharides
Vijay Narayanan
Himanshu Thapliyal
Fernanda Lima Kastensmidt

Contact Us

Michael Huebner - Michael.Huebner@b-tu.de
Nikolaos Voros - voros@go.uop.gr