Because of my broad background in both hardware and software design, I can assist students with Master's Thesis research work in a wide range of areas. In fact, I encourage students enrolling in CS297&298 to formulate their own research topics for investigation. Personally, my own research and teaching efforts focus on interdisciplinary fields, essentially at the hardware/software interface level as shown in the figure below. My primary research interests lie in the applications of artificial intelligence techniques, especially as an enabling technology to build intelligent hardware and software design automation tools. This work would merge computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided software engineering (CASE), and expert systems technologies into a systems-level design environment where tradeoffs can be performed across the hardware/software boundary. In its ultimate form, I envision this unified hardware/software design environment as being distributed and object-oriented to enable various CAD and CASE tools to interoperate. The system would be augmented with various expert system knowledge bases such that it could perform hardware/software co-design and serve as an intelligent design assistant for a systems engineer. Design synthesis along with automated library search and retrieval to facilitate the reuse of previously built IP components would be additional features. The goal is to enable much more complex systems to be designed much faster and more optimally than is presently possible.