• In-Memory Computing Chip as AI Accelerator - Princeton University researchers designed and demonstrated analog neural network integrated with CPU.
• Europe Launches Quantum Flagship R&D Project - 10-year, 1B€ program includes quantum computing, communication, simulation, and sensing.
• New MIT College of Computing - $1B commitment focuses on education and research toward future AI.
• IBM Identifies New Class of Problems for Quantum Computers - Can be implemented using present generation of noisy quantum computers.
• 3 Directions for Moore’s Law - Major companies are taking different approaches to continued scaling of transistors.
• Berkeley Quantum Computing Testbed - New Dept. of Energy project to design and test superconducting circuits for quantum computing.
• US National Cyber Strategy - New reports from White House and US Dept. of Defense on protecting cyber infrastructure.
• White House Summit on Quantum Information Science - US Agencies Plan Coordinated Efforts in Quantum Computing R&D
• IEEE Journal of Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits - Special Issue on Nonvolatile Memory for Efficient Implementation of Neuromorphic Computing

2018 Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge

Report on LPIRC 2018, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, 18 June 2018.

S. Alyamkin, et al (41 co-authors)

A preprint of the paper is available here (PDF, 812 KB).

Computer vision is widely used in many battery-powered systems, and the need for low-power computer vision will become increasingly important. The international LPIRC competition has been held annually since 2015, co-sponsored by IEEE Rebooting Computing. For a video introduction to LPIRC, see here.

The winning entries in the competition identify the best technologies that can classify and detect objects in images both efficiently (short execution time and low energy consumption) and accurately (high precision). Over the past four years, the winners’ scores have improved more than 24 times, with further improvement expected in the future.

The 2018 competition was co-sponsored by Google and Facebook, as well as Purdue, Duke, and UNC. This paper reviews LPIRC 2018 by describing the three different tracks and the winners’ solutions. Winners included teams from Qualcomm, Seoul National University, and ETRI/KPST (S. Korea).

Computing in the Cambrian Age

At the recent IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing (ICRC 2018), one of the keynote talks was by Dr. Paolo Faraboschi of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dr. Faraboschi spoke about “Computing in the Cambrian Era.” This is a reference to a period in ancient earth history some 500 million years ago, when the growth in the diversity of life forms in the oceans suddenly exploded. By analogy, the end of Moore’s Law and the explosion of Big Data are leading to a proliferation of diverse computing technologies, optimized for different technological niches. These include GPUs, TPUs, analog, neuromorphic, optical, superconducting, and quantum computing. This is also creating a crisis in interconnections and communications at all levels, and in software development to manage it all. While not all proposed technologies will ultimately be successful, this is an exciting time for the computer industry. The video of Dr. Faraboschi’s talk is available here.

The Program for ICRC 2018 is available here. Videos of selected talks will soon be available from IEEE.tv, and the print proceedings of the conference will soon be available from IEEE Xplore.

• Rebooting Computing Video Overview
• IEEE Future Directions
• Computing in Science and Engineering on the End of Moore's Law
• IEEE Journal of Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits (JXCDC)
• Arch2030 Workshop Report
• Workshop on Neuromorphic Computing
• Workshop on Beyond CMOS Technology
• Update on National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI)
• RC White Paper on Nanocomputers
• IEEE Computer Magazine on Rebooting Computing
• RC-ITRS Report on the Foundation of the New Computer Industry Beyond 2020