Marian Verhelst

Marian Verhelst is a Full Professor at KU Leuven’s MICAS Laboratories and Research Director at imec Leuven, where she specializes in AI compute chips, hardware acceleration, analog in-memory computing, neuromorphic hardware, and edge AI accelerators. She received a PhD from KU Leuven in 2008, and worked as a research scientist at Intel Labs from 2008 till 2010. Marian is a scientific advisor to multiple startups, member of the board of ECSA, and served in the board of directors of tinyML. She serves as President of the Technical Advisory Board of Italy’s Chips-IT initiative and received the laureate prize of the Royal Academy of Belgium in 2016, the 2021 Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, and the André Mischke YAE Prize for Science and Policy in 2021. Beyond her research, Marian is a dedicated science communicator as a permanent cast member of the monthly Nerdland, a popular Dutch-language science and technology podcast.

Abstract:

Enabling Hybrid AI at the Extreme Edge

Various applications demand more and more powerful machine inference in resource-scarce distributed devices. To allow intelligent applications at ultra-low energy and low latency, one needs 1.) custom AI processors, exploiting parallelism and data reuse under strong resource limitations; 2.) efficient ML models, optimized for the target hardware platform; 3.) data-efficient scheduling techniques and algorithm-to-hardware mapping tools. This talk will zoom into such a future of cross-layer optimized AI platforms for edge computing.