EECS Seminar: Human-Centric Computing – the Case for a Hyper-Dimensional Approach

Abstract: Some of most compelling application domains of the IoT and Swarm concepts relate to how humans interact with the world around them and the cyberworld beyond. While the proliferation of communication and data processing devices has profoundly altered our interaction patterns, little has been changed in the way we process inputs (sensory) and outputs (actuation). The combination of IoT (Swarms) and wearable devices offers the potential for changing all of this, opening the door for true human augmentation.

Yet, making sense of the plethora of information received from the often noisy sensors and making reliable decisions within very tight latency bounds  (< 10 ms) typically demands huge computational workloads to be performed in wearable form factors at extreme energy efficiency. In this presentation, we will make the case why alternative non-Von Neumann computational paradigms and architectures may be the right choice for these cognitive processing tasks. Even more, we will focus on a computational model called Hyper-Dimensional Computing (HDC) and illustrate with concrete  examples of why this approach may be the right one.

Bio: Jan Rabaey holds the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship at UC Berkeley. He is a founding director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and the Berkeley Ubiquitous SwarmLab and is currently the electrical engineering division chair at Berkeley. Rabaey has made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including advanced wireless systems, low-power integrated circuits, sensor networks and ubiquitous computing. His current interests include the conception of the next-generation integrated wireless systems over a broad range of applications, as well as exploring the interaction between the cyber and the biological world.

Rabaey is the recipient of major awards, including the IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Award, the European Design Automation Association Lifetime Achievement award and the Semiconductor Industry Association University Researcher Award. He is an IEEE Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium and has received honorary doctorates from Lund (Sweden), Antwerp (Belgium) and Tampere (Finland). He also has been involved in a broad variety of start-up ventures.