Fourth Workshop on Architecture for Health
A half-day workshop exploring the key computational challenges in health-related applications and the vital role of computer architecture in overcoming them to advance healthcare
1st November 2026, Athens, Greece
In conjunction with the 59th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2026)
Workshop Description
Opportunities. Recent biotechnological advances enable high-throughput, low-cost, and accurate biological data generation (e.g., using genome sequencing, multimodal medical imaging, continuous wearable sensing). This wealth of data enables unique opportunities for advancing healthcare. These opportunities include, but are not limited to, precision medicine, bedside personalized care, discovering early warning signs of communicable diseases, continuous physiological tracking, and enhanced diagnostic capabilities.
Challenges. Despite these opportunities, efficiently analyzing large-scale biological data poses significant challenges for conventional computing systems. These systems often cannot keep up with the high-throughput rate at which data is generated, and they face additional constraints related to energy efficiency, scalability, privacy, and security. High-throughput processing is particularly crucial in clinical settings, where real-time data processing can significantly impact patient outcomes by improving both response times in time-critical scenarios as well as the decision-making processes for therapeutic schemes. Therefore, to facilitate the wide adoption of recent advances in healthcare, there is a need to optimize the computing systems to enable high-performance, energy-efficient, low-cost, private, and secure analysis of biological data.
Architecture for Health. This workshop will focus on identifying key computational challenges in health-related applications and discussing how computer architects can contribute to advancing healthcare by addressing these challenges. First, we will provide invited talks and keynotes that summarize (i) a series of research in computing system designs for healthcare applications and (ii) new trends and bottlenecks in data-intensive healthcare applications. Second, we will invite researchers to submit their ongoing work on these topics.
Fostering Diverse and Cross-Disciplinary Discussions. Since cross-disciplinary discussions are crucial for better identifying challenges in real-world health-related applications, we aim to foster open discussions and cooperation between researchers with diverse backgrounds (i.e., from both computer architecture and health sciences communities, industry, and academia).
Call for Presentations
This workshop consists of talks on the general topic of computing system designs for healthcare applications and new trends and bottlenecks in data-intensive healthcare applications. There are a limited number of slots for talks. If you are interested in delivering a talk on related topics, please submit your talk’s title and extended abstract via this Google Form. You may either paste the abstract directly into the form or upload a two-page PDF prepared in any standard conference template. Each submission must include the talk title, all authors’ names, and their affiliations.
We invite abstract submissions related to (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Computational Biology
- Genomics
- Metagenomics
- Gene editing
- Drug Design and Discovery
- Proteomics
- Other Areas in Precision Medicine
- Neuroscience
- Brain-Machine Interfaces
- Prosthetics
- Wearable Systems for Health
- Medical robotics
- Surgery
- Haptics
- Mental Health
- Medical Imaging
- Brain scans
- Radiology
- Single-Cell Analysis
- Agent-Based Simulations
- Medical Privacy
- Bio-Sensors
Key Dates
- Extended Abstract Submission Deadline: 4 October 2026
- Notification: 9 October 2026
- Workshop Date: 1 November 2026
Organizers
Email: nika.mansourighiasi@safari.ethz.ch
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi is a senior researcher in the SAFARI Research Group at ETH Zurich, where she recently obtained her PhD advised by Professor Onur Mutlu. Nika is currently on the academic job market for tenure-track faculty positions. Her research spans across the computing stack to tackle computational challenges in healthcare, life sciences, and beyond. She is especially excited about designing high-performance, energy-efficient, and low-cost systems for (i) widespread adoption of data-intensive applications in healthcare and life sciences and (ii) enabling new solutions that were out of reach before, both in these domains and in other critical domains, such as AI/ML. Her research has received various honors and recognitions, such as induction to the ISCA hall of fame in 2026, selected as one of the 20 young researchers to attend and present at the Heidelberg Leaureatte Forum in 2026, ETH Doc.Mobility Fellowship (supporting her visiting research period at Stanford University), and ACM SRC Grand Finalist at PACT 2024. For more information, please check her website: https://nikamgh.github.io/.
Email: kkoliogeorgi@ethz.ch
Konstantina Koliogeorgi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the SAFARI Research Group at ETH Zurich, led by Prof. Onur Mutlu. She received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2023 at National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), advised by Prof. Dimitrios Soudris. Her research interests are in the field of computer systems and architecture, heterogeneous computing, and hardware acceleration. Her research has focused on hardware-software co-design, efficient high-level synthesis optimization, and design space exploration, targeting mainly genome analysis applications.
Email: etzermpou@ethz.ch
Eirini Tzermpou is currently a graduate researcher in the SAFARI Research Group at ETH Zurich, led by Prof. Onur Mutlu. She recently received her Integrated Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and her Bachelor’s in Biomedical Sciences from DEREE-The American College of Greece. Her research interests lie in the intersection of computer architecture with bioinformatics and biomedicine, with a focus on designing software-hardware co-designed systems for accelerating bio-analysis workflows.
Email: omutlu@gmail.com
Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He previously held the William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Early Career Professorship at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are in computer architecture, computing systems, hardware security, memory & storage systems, and bioinformatics, with a major focus on designing fundamentally energy-efficient, high-performance, and robust computing systems. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held product, research, and visiting positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, Google, and Stanford University. He received various honors for his research, including the 2025 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award “for seminal contributions to computer architecture research and practice, especially in memory systems.” He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and an elected member of the Academy of Europe. He enjoys teaching, mentoring, and enabling & democratizing access to high-quality research and education. He has supervised 24 PhD graduates, many of whom received major dissertation awards, 15 postdoctoral trainees, and more than 60 Master’s and Bachelor’s students. His computer architecture and digital logic design course lectures and materials are freely available on YouTube, and his research group makes a wide variety of artifacts freely available online. For more information, please see his webpage at https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.
Agenda & Workshop Materials
Previous Iteration
You can find information regarding the previous iterations of the workshop (held in conjunction with MICRO 2025 in Seoul, HPCA 2026 in Sydney and ICS 2026 in Belfast) here, here and here.