Rate My Professor Ilia Polian

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Ilia Polian serves as Head of the Institute of Computer Architecture and Computer Engineering and Chair of Hardware Oriented Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart since October 2017. Previously, he was Full Professor and Chair of Computer Engineering at the University of Passau from April 2010 to October 2017 and Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics there from October 2013 to September 2015. Earlier positions include Senior Postdoctoral Researcher leading the test and reliability subgroup in the Computer Architecture Group at the University of Freiburg from December 2003 to March 2010, and Researcher at the same group from October 1999 to November 2003. His academic background includes a Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Freiburg in 1999, Dr. rer. nat. (PhD) summa cum laude in Computer Science in 2003 and Habilitation in 2008 from Freiburg, and a Diploma in Economics with distinction from the University of Hagen in 2008.

Polian's research interests include hardware-oriented security such as fault-injection attacks, hardware Trojans, physical unclonable functions, and side-channel countermeasures; robustness and test of nano- and microelectronic circuits involving defect modeling, power-aware test, and reliability; emerging architectures like stochastic circuits for neuromorphic applications and memristive components; and quantum computing encompassing topological error correction, NISQ devices, and variational quantum algorithms. He has received the Best Paper Award at IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS'14) for "Variation-Aware Deterministic ATPG", Best Paper Award (Test category) at IEEE DDECS 2011, Wolfgang-Gentner Award in 2004, and was European Champion and Vice World Champion at ACM ICPC 1999. An IEEE Senior Member since 2007, he has guest-edited special issues on hardware security for it – Information Technology (2019), Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications (2016), and IET Computers & Digital Techniques (2014). Key publications comprise "Hardware-efficient preparation of architecture-specific graph states on near-term quantum computers" (Scientific Reports, 2025), "Synergistic Dynamical Decoupling and Circuit Design for Enhanced Algorithm Performance on Near-Term Quantum Devices" (Entropy, 2024), "Algorithm-oriented qubit mapping for variational quantum algorithms" (Physical Review Applied, 2025), "Automatic construction of fault attacks on cryptographic hardware implementations" (2019), and "Hardware-oriented Algebraic Fault Attack Framework with Multiple Fault Injection Support" (2019).