Graduate

Check-in at Sequoia Plaza (in front of the Packard and Hewlett Buildings)...

We examine the world of infrastructure (bits, cores, and fabrics) through the lens of data. The talk begins with a survey of data sources, data varieties, and their growth trends. We review the lifecycle of data in order to understand the processes by which data is turned into insightful information. The body of the talk takes a data-centric view of the world and derives a memory-centric computer architecture, in which the primacy of data is reflected in the engineering of infrastructure. We will see that bits, cores and fabrics line up very differently in a memory-centric architecture than in traditional architectures, and even basic operating systems concepts such as virtual memory have a new design.

The talk concludes with a survey of long-term workload and device architecture trends, especially machine learning and memristive devices, and how that aligns with a move to data centricity.

Spend a quarter abroad, obtain valuable teaching experience, and get paid doing it –  apply for the Teaching Fellowship in Kyoto, Japan!

Currently, the EE Department is looking to fill one Teaching Fellow position for the Bing Overseas Studies Program (BOSP) in Kyoto, Japan. The BOSP is managed by Stanford's Overseas Studies Program (OSP) office, and is a Stanford Center for Technology and Innovation (SCTI) initiative in Kyoto. Additionally, it is an enriching experience and great opportunity for EE students who wish to gain further teaching experience and travel abroad.

Funding:

• A stipend which follows the structure currently in place on the Stanford Campus.
• Health care subsidy
• Round trip airfare for the TF and optionally for the spouse/partner.

Overseas Studies provides funding for this position to compensate for the location of the position and the impacts that this has on the TF's daily life. Overseas Studies provides the following funding:

• Housing of an apartment in Kyoto including utilities and local phone service. This will match the accommodations offered to Stanford Students who stay in apartments.
• A Supplementary Meal Allowance equal to the current apartment student meal allowance to supplement living expenses while in Japan.

Reimbursements and support for living expenses while in Kyoto will be managed by the Kyoto Center Office.

Teaching:

• ENGR 40M in Spring 2018 in Kyoto

Kyoto Spring Quarter Teaching Fellow 2018 application. Please note that the application deadline is September 15th, 2017. Contact EE Student Services with questions.

Labs are available with card access.

Please plan accordingly.

Full duplex communication technology is maturing thanks to recent advances in reducing self interference to very small levels. This potentially paves the way for deploying this technology in sub 6 GHz bands in 5G networks. However, there are still major challenges in attaining this goal; 5G ecosystems are expected to incorporate dense networks, and such networks can increase the level of multiuser interference in full duplex regime. This problem can be more serious in mobile full duplex communication. This talk will go through the challenges ahead for deploying FD technology in 5G and tries to discuss about some of the solutions.

Building on the technology and infrastructure of the CMOS world, silicon photonics has become a mature and mainstream platform for high datarate transceivers in telecommunication, data communication and interconnects. But there are so many other applications that could benefit from the key assets of silicon photonics. In particular in the field of sensing the opportunities are endless, from biosensing to 3D imaging, from fiber sensor readout to spectroscopic sensing of liquid or gaseous analytes. In this talk I will discuss some of the key scientific challenges encountered when applying silicon photonics to sensing functions.

Over the past two decades, the storage capacity and access bandwidth of main memory have improved tremendously, by 128x and 20x, respectively. These improvements are mainly due to the continuous technology scaling of DRAM (dynamic random-access memory), which has been used as the physical substrate for main memory. In stark contrast with capacity and bandwidth, DRAM latency has remained almost constant, reducing by only 1.3x in the same time frame. Therefore, long DRAM latency continues to be a critical performance bottleneck in modern systems. Increasing core counts, and the emergence of increasingly more data-intensive and latency-critical applications further stress the importance of providing low-latency memory accesses.

In this talk, we will identify three main problems that contribute significantly to long latency of DRAM accesses. To address these problems, we show that (1) augmenting DRAM chip architecture with simple and low-cost features, and (2) developing a better understanding of manufactured DRAM chips together leads to significant memory latency reduction. Our new proposals significantly improve both system performance and energy efficiency.

All undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctorates, faculty, and staff are invited to attend a symposium exploring the breadth of imaging research at Stanford. Students and post-doctorates are encouraged to present a poster at the event. To RSVP and/or submit a poster title, please visit the website below.

Invited Speakers

• John Boone: Professor of Radiology at UC Davis who has developed a novel CT imaging system to be used for mammography.
• Vik Bajaj: Co-founder and former Chief Scientific Officer of Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences); currently the head of Precision Medicine and Translational Science at GRAIL, a startup focused on early cancer detection.

Microgrids are a promising and viable solution for integrating the distributed generation resources in future power systems. Similar to large-scale power systems, microgrids are prone to a range of instability mechanisms and are naturally fragile with respect to disturbances. However, existing planning and operation practices employed in large scale transmission grids usually cannot be downscaled to small low-voltage microgrids. This talk will discuss the concept of ad-hoc microgrids that allow for arbitrary interconnection and switching with guaranteed stability. Although the problem of microgrid stability and control has received a lot of attention in the last years, vast majority of existing works assumed that the network configuration is given and fixed. Moreover, only few works have accounted for electromagnetic delays that will be shown to play a critical role in the context of stability.

The talk will introduce a new mathematical framework for characterization and certification of stability in an ad-hoc setting and derive the formal design constraints for both DC and AC networks. In the context of low-voltage DC network, the corresponding derivations will employ the Brayton-Moser potential theory and result in simple conditions on load capacitances that guarantee both small-signal and transient stability. Whereas for AC microgrids, the singular perturbation analysis will be used to derive simple relations for the droop coefficient of neighboring networks. The talk will conclude with a discussion of key open problems and challenges.

Electric distribution systems are transforming from a traditionally passive element to an active component of the Smart Grid with a hitherto unprecedented availability of new technologies, data, control, and options for end-users to participate in the daily operations of the grid. To realize the full potential of this transformation there is a dire need for new architectures, markets, tools, techniques, and testbeds. In that regard, this talk presents a comprehensive approach based on cyber-physical-social system to energy management in the emerging smart distribution system with new research results from on-going efforts. Topics of aggregators, incentive pricing, customer-side intelligence, and sustainability metrics as well as aspects of current and future trends in this research will be addressed.