Efficient Computing for AI and Robotics

Vivienne Sze, MIT

Vivienne Sze is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. She is also the director of the Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems research group at the Research Lab of Electronics (RLE). Sze works on computing systems that enable energy-efficient machine learning, computer vision, and video compression/processing for a wide range of applications, including autonomous navigation, digital health, and the internet of things. She is widely recognized for her leading work in these areas and has received many awards, including the AFOSR and DARPA Young Faculty Award, the Edgerton Faculty Award, several faculty awards from Google, Facebook, and Qualcomm, the 2018 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Best Student Paper Award, the 2017 CICC Outstanding Invited Paper Award, and the 2016 IEEE Micro Top Picks Award. As a member of the JCT-VC team, she received the Primetime Engineering Emmy Award for the development of the HEVC video compression standard.

Computing at the edge (near the sensor) is preferred over the cloud due to privacy and/or latency concerns for a wide range of applications including robotics/drones, self-driving cars, smart Internet of Things, and portable/wearable electronics. However, at the edge there are often stringent constraints on energy consumption and cost in addition to the throughput and accuracy requirements of the application. In this talk, we will describe how joint algorithm and hardware design can be used to reduce energy consumption while delivering real-time and robust performance for applications including deep learning, computer vision, autonomous navigation/exploration and video/image processing.

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