He received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University and his B.S. degree from Clarkson University. He worked as a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University's Department of Electronic Engineering, as a Visiting Researcher at NEC Labs America, and as an Associate Professor at Northwestern University. Robert received an NSF CAREER award and won his department's Best Teacher of the Year award in 2004. His technology won a Computerworld Horizon Award and his paper was selected by DATE as one of the 30 most influential in the past 10 years in 2007. He served as a technical program subcommittee chair for the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems and serves on the technical program committees of several embedded systems and CAD/VLSI conferences.