Topic: Approximate, Stochastic and Ising Computing
Speaker: Professor HAN Jie, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta (UAlberta)
Date and time: 10:00–11:00, July 15
Venue: Room 1C 201, SIST
Host: LIU Siting
Abstract:
As an emerging paradigm for energy-efficient circuit and system design, approximate computing exploits the error resilience in many applications by producing sufficiently accurate results. Stochastic computing utilizes random binary bit streams to encode information for nondeterministic processing with simplistic circuits. As a mathematical formulation, the Ising model describes the electromagnetic interactions among spins. Recently, computer chips built on the principles of the Ising model were shown to be capable of solving combinatorial optimization problems. This talk will introduce these three seemingly disjoint computing paradigms and attempts to explore the correlation and synergy among them. In particular, we will focus on the design of an approximate parallel annealing-based Ising machine that utilizes approximate functions and arithmetic circuits to achieve a trade-off between energy efficiency and solution quality.
Biography:
Prof. HAN Jie received the B.Sc. degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University in 1999 and the Ph.D. degree from the Delft University of Technology in 2004. He is currently a Professor and Director of Computer Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta. His research interests include approximate computing, stochastic computing, reliability and fault tolerance, nanoelectronic circuits and systems, novel computational models for learning and biological applications.
Prof. HAN was a recipient of the Best Paper Awards at the International Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures (NANOARCH 2015) and the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE 2023), as well as several Best Paper Nominations at the 25th Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2015), NANOARCH 2016, the 19th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED 2018) and DATE 2022. He was nominated for the 2006 Christiaan Huygens Prize of Science by the Royal Dutch Academy of Science. His work was recognized by Science, for developing a theory of fault-tolerant nanocircuits (2005).
He serves (or served) as an Associate Editor for several journals including IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society, Microelectronics Reliability, and Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Application. He served as a General Chair for NANOARCH 2021, GLSVLSI 2017 and the IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI and Nanotechnology Systems (DFT) 2013, and a Technical Program Committee Chair for NANOARCH 2022, GLSVLSI 2016, DFT 2012 and the Symposium on Stochastic & Approximate Computing for Signal Processing and Machine Learning, 2017.