SSCS VLSIedu 2019 -"AI Computing: The Promised Land for Hardware?" - Presented by Masato Motomura

Abstract- Recently a lot of architectural proposals have been proposed for the accelerated execution of the inference or training of DNNs, especially at the edge. Most of them have common architectural features: i.e., hardware-oriented, reconfigurable, domain-specific, and in/near-memory. This short lecture addresses why they are happening and what are the recent findings.
Biography- Masato Motomura received B.S. and M.S. in 1985 and 1987, respectively, and Ph.D. of Electrical Engineering in 1996, all from Kyoto University. He joined NEC research laboratories in 1987, where he worked on various hardware architectures including multi-thread parallel processors, memory-based processors, and reconfigurable systems. From 2001 to 2008 he led research and productization of DRP (dynamically reconfigurable processor) that he invented. He was also a visiting researcher at MIT Laboratory for Computer Science from 1991 to 1992. He became a professor at Hokkaido University in 2011, and then a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 2019 where he is currently leading AI Computing Research Unit. He won the IEEE JSSC Annual Best Paper Award in 1992, IPSJ Annual Best Paper Award in 1999, and IEICE Achievement Award in 2011, ISSCC Silkroad Award as the last author in 2018, respectively. He is a member of IEEE, IEICE, IPSJ, and EAJ.