Conte holds a joint appointment as a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research is in the areas of computer architecture and compiler optimization, with emphasis on manycore architectures, microprocessor architectures, back-end compiler code generation, architectural performance evaluation, and embedded computer system architectures.

An IEEE Fellow, Conte has served the IEEE Computer Society in a variety of capacities, including as a member of its board of governors, vice president for publications, awards committee chair,  and past chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture. Conte is currently the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Architecture and Compiler Optimization and is a past associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers and the IEEE Computer and IEEE Micro magazines.