Professor Luca Carloni - Columbia University

Title: Accelerating Embedded Machine Learning with the Open-Source ESP Infrastructure

Abstract: Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have depended on the continued progress of hardware computing platforms. Future advances will depend even more on the synergistic progress of hardware and software. This is the case particularly for embedded ML applications, where developers must meet performance requirements under tighter resource constraints. The emerging open-source hardware community can play a unique role in supporting embedded ML research. ESP is an open-source research platform to design and program heterogeneous systems-on-chip. With the design automation capabilities of ESP, application developers can synthesize hardware accelerators from models specified in common ML frameworks, integrate these accelerators in a complete system-on-chip, and quickly obtain FPGA-based prototypes to evaluate their design by running embedded ML applications.

Keywords: SoC design, ML frameworks, FPGA

Bio: Luca Carloni is Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University in the City of New York. He holds a Laurea Degree Summa cum Laude in Electronics Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include methodologies and tools for system-on-chip platforms with emphasis on heterogeneous computing, intellectual property reuse, design of networks-on-chip, embedded software, and distributed embedded systems. He coauthored over one hundred and fifty refereed papers and is the holder of two patents. Luca received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation in 2006, was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2008, and received the ONR Young Investigator Award and the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2010 and 2012, respectively. In 2013 Luca served as general chair of Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek), the premier event covering all aspects of embedded systems and software. Luca is an IEEE Fellow.