EE380 Computer Systems Colloquium

A focus on energy efficiency in the late CMOS design era, requires extra careful attention to system reliability and resilience to hardware-sourced errors. At the same time, the emergence of AI (cognitive) applications as a key growth segment is quite obvious. This talk will attempt to address the special challenges that next generation AI (or cognitive) systems pose, with a particular focus on next generation cognitive IoT architectures. We will discuss this primarily from the point of view of providing energy-efficient resilience in environments that are likely to have built-in vulnerability to errors. Such uncertainty stems not just from potentially error-prone (late CMOS) hardware designed for extreme efficiency, but also from algorithmic brittleness of the most prevalent forms of machine learning/deep learning (ML/DL) solution strategies today. In that context, we will briefly examine the promise of the Adaptive Swarm Intelligence (ASI) architectural paradigm that we have recently started investigating at IBM Research. This is a form of distributed or decentralized computing applied to the world of mobile cognitive IoT, backed by resilient support from back-end cloud (server) systems. In addition to examining the promises of inherent system architectural scalability and in-field, continuous learning that ASI offers, we will argue (albeit philosophically!) about why this could open the door to new models of self-aware systems that mimic cooperative and conscious problem solving in a human setting.

The Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380) meets on Wednesdays 4:30-5:45 throughout the academic year. Talks are given before a live audience in Room B03 in the basement of the Gates Computer Science Building on the Stanford Campus. The live talks (and the videos hosted at Stanford and on YouTube) are open to the public.

Stanford students may enroll in EE380 to take the Colloquium as a one unit S/NC class. Enrolled students are required to keep and electronic notebook or journal and to write a short, pithy comment about each of the ten lectures and a short free form evaluation of the class in order to receive credit. Assignments are due at the end of the quarter, on the last day of examinations.

EE380 is a video class. Live attendance is encouraged but not required. We (the organizers) feel that watching the video is not a substitute for being present in the classroom. Questions are encouraged.

Many past EE380 talks are available on YouTube, see the EE380 Playlist.

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The Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380) meets on Wednesdays 4:30-5:45 throughout the academic year. Talks are given before a live audience in Room B03 in the basement of the Gates Computer Science Building on the Stanford Campus. The live talks (and the videos hosted at Stanford and on YouTube) are open to the public.

Stanford students may enroll in EE380 to take the Colloquium as a one unit S/NC class. Enrolled students are required to keep and electronic notebook or journal and to write a short, pithy comment about each of the ten lectures and a short free form evaluation of the class in order to receive credit. Assignments are due at the end of the quarter, on the last day of examinations.

EE380 is a video class. Live attendance is encouraged but not required. We (the organizers) feel that watching the video is not a substitute for being present in the classroom. Questions are encouraged.

Many past EE380 talks are available on YouTube, see the EE380 Playlist.

Today's society is rapidly advancing towards robotics systems that interact and collaborate with humans, e.g., semi-autonomous vehicles interacting with drivers and pedestrians, medical robots used in collaboration with doctors, or service robots interacting with their users in smart homes. In this talk, I will first discuss interactive autonomy, where we develop algorithms for autonomous systems that influence humans, and further leverage these effects for better safety, efficiency, coordination, and estimation. I will then focus on our efficient active learning methods to build predictive models of humans's preferences by eliciting comparisons from a mixed set of humans, and further analyzing the generalizability and robustness of the learned human models for safe and seamless interaction with robots.

The Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380) meets on Wednesdays 4:30-5:45 throughout the academic year. Talks are given before a live audience in Room B03 in the basement of the Gates Computer Science Building on the Stanford Campus. The live talks (and the videos hosted at Stanford and on YouTube) are open to the public.

Stanford students may enroll in EE380 to take the Colloquium as a one unit S/NC class. Enrolled students are required to keep and electronic notebook or journal and to write a short, pithy comment about each of the ten lectures and a short free form evaluation of the class in order to receive credit. Assignments are due at the end of the quarter, on the last day of examinations.

EE380 is a video class. Live attendance is encouraged but not required. We (the organizers) feel that watching the video is not a substitute for being present in the classroom. Questions are encouraged.

Many past EE380 talks are available on YouTube, see the EE380 Playlist.

Python is a dynamically typed language, and some of its appeal derives from this. Nevertheless, especially for large code bases, it would be nice if a compiler could find type errors before the code is even run. Optional static type checking promises exactly this, and over the past four years we have successfully introduced this feature into Python 3. This talk introduces the type system we've adopted and the syntax used for type annotations, some tips on how to get started with a large existing code base, and our experience using the 'mypy' type checker at Dropbox. The entire system is open source, and has also been adopted by other companies such as Lyft, Quora and Facebook.

Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly in the last five years. This talk intends to provide high level answers to questions like:

• What can the evolution of intelligence in the animal kingdom teach us about the evolution of AI?
• How should people who are not AI researchers view the societal transformation that is now underway? What are some of the social, economic, and political implications of this technology as it exists now?
• What will future AI systems likely be capable of, and what are the largest expected impacts of these systems?

The talk will be understandable for non-computer scientists.

Neuroscience has entered a golden age in which experimental technologies now allow us to record thousands of neurons, over many trials during complex behaviors, yielding large-scale, high dimensional datasets. However, while we can record thousands of neurons, mammalian circuits controlling complex behaviors can contain tens of millions of behaviorally relevant neurons. Thus, despite significant experimental advances, neuroscience remains in a vastly undersampled measurement regime. Nevertheless, a wide array of statistical procedures for dimensionality reduction of multineuronal recordings uncover remarkably insightful, low dimensional neural state space dynamics whose geometry reveals how behavior and cognition emerge from neural circuits. What theoretical principles explain this remarkable success; in essence, how is it that we can understand anything about the brain while recording an infinitesimal fraction of its degrees of freedom?

We present a theory that addresses this question, and test it using neural data recorded from reaching monkeys. Overall, this theory yields a picture of the neural measurement process as a random projection of neural dynamics, conceptual insights into how we can reliably recover neural state space dynamics in such under-sampled measurement regimes, and quantitative guidelines for the design of future experiments. Moreover, it reveals the existence of phase transition boundaries in our ability to successfully decode cognition and behavior on single trials as a function of the number of recorded neurons, the complexity of the task, and the smoothness of neural dynamics. We will also discuss non-negative tensor analysis methods to perform multi-timescale dimensionality reduction and demixing of neural dynamics that reveal how rapid neural dynamics within single trials mediate perception, cognition and action, and how slow changes in these dynamics mediate learning.

A growing proportion of human activities such as social interactions, entertainment, shopping, and gathering information are now mediated by digital devices and services. Such digitally mediated activities can be easily recorded, offering an unprecedented opportunity to study and measure intimate psycho-demographic traits using actual--rather than self-reported--behavior. Our research shows that digital records of behavior, such as samples of text, Tweets, Facebook Likes, web-browsing logs, or even facial images can be used to accurately measure a wide range of traits including personality, intelligence, and political views. Such Big Data assessment has a number of advantages: it does not require participants' active involvement; it can be easily and inexpensively applied to large populations; and it is relatively immune to cheating or misrepresentation. If used ethically, it could revolutionize psychological assessment, marketing, recruitment, insurance, and many other industries. In the wrong hands, however, such methods pose significant privacy risks. In this talk, we will discuss how to reap the benefits of Big Data assessment while avoiding the pitfalls.

Circuit and design division at CEA LETI is focusing on innovative architectures and circuits dedicated to digital, imagers, wireless, sensors, power management and embedded software. After a brief overview of adaptive circuits for low power multi-processors and IoT architectures, the talk will detail new technologies opportunities for more flexibility. Digital and mixed-signal architectures using 3D technologies will be presented in the scope of multi-processors activity as well as imagers and neuro-inspired circuits. Also, the integration of non-volatile memories will be shown in the perspective of new architectures for computing. Finally, embedding learning will be addressed to solve power challenges at the edge and in end-devices: some new design approaches will be discussed.

Wireless communications are ubiquitous in the 21 st century--we use them to read the newspaper, talk to our colleagues or children, watch sporting events or other forms of entertainment, and to monitor and control the environment we live ins-- among just a few. This exponentiation of demand for wireless capacity has driven a new era of innovation in this space because spectrum and energy are expensive and constrained resources.

The future of wireless communications will demand leaps in spectrum efficiency, bandwidth efficiency, and power efficiency for successful technology deployments. Key applications that will fundamentally change how we interact with wireless systems and the demands we place on wireless technologies include Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks, massive MIMO, and the evasive unicorn of the "universal handset". While each of these breakthrough "system" capabilities make simultaneous demands of spectrum efficiency, bandwidth efficiency, and power efficiency, the current suite of legacy technologies forces system designers to make undesirable trade-offs because of the limitations of linear amplifier technology.

Eridan's solution is the antithesis of "linear". The Switch Mode Mixer Modulator (SMs3 ) technology emphasizes precision and flexibility, and simultaneously delivers spectrum efficiency, bandwidth efficiency, and power efficiency. The resulting capabilities dramatically increase total wireless capacity with minimum need for expanding operations into extended regions of the wireless spectrum.

This presentation will discuss the driving forces behind wireless system performance, the physics of linear amplifiers and SM3, measured performance of SM3 systems, and the implications for wireless system capabilities in the near future.