State-of-the-art information and communication technologies have become absolutely essential for all industries as the world is becoming more and more interconnected and data-driven. This trend has been further accelerated by the COVID pandemic. Where is the digital frontier today and what lies ahead? The annual MIT Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) event explores the latest research from across the Institute and its potential impact across industries. The webinar series will feature three sessions by six MIT faculty on the following topics: wireless communications, low power/edge computing and urban infrastructure. Additionally, a fourth session will feature MIT-connected startups presenting on the same topics.
ICT Webinar Series
Tomás Palacios is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California - Santa Barbara in 2006 and his undergraduate degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). His current research focuses on demonstrating new electronic devices and applications for novel semiconductor materials such as graphene and gallium nitride. His work has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the 2012 and 2019 IEEE George Smith Award, and the NSF, ONR, and DARPA Young Faculty Awards, among many others. Prof. Palacios is the founder and director of the MIT MTL Center for Graphene Devices and 2D Systems, as well as the Chief Advisor and co-founder of Finwave Semiconductor, Inc. He is a Fellow of IEEE.
The end of traditional transistor scaling brings unprecedented new opportunities to semiconductor devices and electronics. In this new era, heterogeneous integration of new materials becomes key in order to add new functionality and value to electronic chips. This talk will review some examples of these new opportunities, including 1. Gallium Nitride vertical power transistors and CMOS logic for a much more efficient electric grid; 2. One-layer-thick molybdenum disulfide wi-fi energy harvesters to enable ubiquitous electronics; 3. High temperature CMOS technology to power future missions to Venus; and 4. A new generation of cell-sized autonomous electronic microsystems to revolutionize environmental monitoring and healthcare. The seminar will conclude with a reflection on how the democratization of heterogeneous integration and the unique properties of extreme materials will transform our society just as Moore’s law has done for the last 50 years.
Song Han is an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on efficient deep learning computing. He has proposed “deep compression” as a way to reduce neural network size by an order of magnitude, and the hardware implementation “efficient inference engine” that first exploited model compression and weight sparsity in deep learning accelerators. He has received best paper awards at the International Conference on Learning Representations and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays symposium. He is also a recipient of an NSF Career Award and MIT Tech Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 award. Many of his pruning, compression, and acceleration techniques have been integrated into commercial artificial intelligence chips. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Machine learning on tiny IoT devices based on microcontroller units (MCU) is appealing but challenging: the memory of microcontrollers is 2-3 orders of magnitude less than mobile phones, not to mention GPUs. I will introduce key technologies for neural network optimization on IoT devices, including model compression (pruning, quantization), neural architecture search, and compiler/runtime optimizations. Based on that, we propose MCUNet, a framework that jointly designs the efficient neural architecture (TinyNAS) and the lightweight inference engine (TinyEngine). MCUNet automatically designs perfectly matched neural architecture and the inference library on MCU. MCUNet enables ImageNet-scale inference on microcontrollers that has only 1MB of FLASH and 320KB SRAM. It achieves significant speedup compared to existing MCU libraries: TF-Lite Micro, CMSIS-NN, and MicroTVM. Our study suggests that the era of tiny machine learning on IoT devices has arrived.