CASS Talks with David Atienza, Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL), EPFL, Switzerland

#CASS #Talks #2021

Abstract:

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been hailed as the next frontier of innovation in which our everyday objects are connected in ways that improve our lives and transform industries. However, major challenges remain in achieving this potential due to the inherent complexity of designing energy-efficient IoT architectures to provide onboard processing capabilities where data are gathered (edge computing) for many different possible applications, often resulting in degraded and unreliable behavior and a short lifetime. Prof. Atienza will first present the challenges of ultra-low power (ULP) design and communication overhead in next-generation IoT devices in the context of Big Data processing. Then, the benefits of exploiting the latest knowledge of how mammalian brains operate to conceive future edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled architectures will be discussed. These new edge AI architectures must be heterogeneous hardware systems, including energy-scalable software layers that trigger the activation of components by event-driven techniques. As a result, the next-generation edge AI architectures will be able to gracefully adapt the energy consumption and output precision according to their available energy at each moment in time. 

Short Bio: 

David Atienza is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and heads the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from UCM (Spain) and IMEC (Belgium). His research interests focus on system-level design methodologies for energy-efficient computing systems, particularly multi-processor system-on-chip architectures (MPSoC) for servers and next-generation edge AI architectures for the Internet of Things (IoT) era. In these fields, he is co-author of more than 350 publications, 12 patents, and has received several best paper awards in top conferences. He was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. Dr. Atienza received among other recognitions, the ICCAD 2020 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award, the DAC Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, the IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member, and was the President (period 2018-2019) of IEEE CEDA.