About

The 6th Workshop on the Future of Computing Architectures (FOCA 2021) will be held on Friday October 29th , 2021 in a virtual format. This event is a full-day workshop that provides a forum for invited students in a broad range of fields covering all aspects of architectures for the future of computing. Invited students are expected to showcase their work and interact with their peers and members of the IBM Research community.

The topics covered by FOCA 2021 include but are not limited to:

  • Architectures for artificial intelligence / machine learning.
  • Security- and reliability-aware architectures.
  • Architectures for cloud, high-performance computing, and data centers.
  • Next-generation memory architectures.
  • Parallel architectures.
  • Power‐efficient architectures and systems.
  • Embedded, IoT, reconfigurable, and heterogeneous architectures.
  • Architectures for emerging technology and applications.
  • Quantum computing, quantum circuit optimization.

Past Editions


Contact

Organizing Committee

  • Sandhya Koteshwara
  • Karthik Swaminathan
  • David Trilla
  • Augusto Vega

Selection Committee

  • Alper Buyuktosunoglu
  • Anne Gattiker
  • Anthony Saporito
  • Ashish Ranjan
  • Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee
  • Brian Prasky
  • Bruce D'Amora
  • Bulent Abali
  • Chia-yu Chen
  • Christine Ouyang
  • Hubertus Franke
  • Jaime Moreno
  • Jane Bartik
  • Jinjun Xiong
  • John-David Wellman
  • Kailash Gopalakrishnan
  • Kaoutar el Maghraoui
  • Karthick Rajamani
  • Madhavi G Valluri
  • Manoj Kumar
  • Martin Cochet
  • Matthew Zeigler
  • Monodeep Kar
  • Nagu Dhanwada
  • Paul Crumley
  • Peilin Song
  • Prabhakar Kudva
  • Pradip Bose
  • Prasanth Chatarasi
  • Ravi Nair
  • Sameh Asaad
  • Sanchari Sen
  • Sunil Shukla
  • Swagath Venkataramani
  • Xiaoxiong Gu
  • Xinyu Que

Interesting Links

The AI and Robotics Timeline from 1939 to date.

The IBM Q Experience to try a quantum computer online.

IBM Watson in action in this on-line demo using deep learning.

The AI Portal with the latest IBM research activities.

Keynote Speakers

Mayflower Autonomous Ship - the future of autonomous marine exploration

Andy Stanford-Clark (IBM Corporate Strategy)

Prof Andy Stanford-Clark leads transformational innovation projects for clients in EMEA as part of IBM's Corporate Strategy organisation. He is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, a Master Inventor with more than 40 patents, and is IBM's Quantum Computing leader for the UK. Andy is based at IBM's Hursley Park laboratories near Winchester, and has has been working in the area that we now call the Internet of Things for more than 20 years. He has a BSc in Computing and Mathematics, and a PhD in Computer Science. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle, an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southampton, and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Systems Security in a Zero Trust World: An Industrial Research Perspective

Josyula R. Rao

J.R. Rao is an IBM Fellow and CTO for the Security Research team at IBM. Based at the IBM Thomas. J. Watson Research Center, the global team comprises more than 200 researchers who work in the areas of AI Security, Cybersecurity, Cloud and Systems Security, Information Security and Cryptography. JR works closely with commercial and government customers, academic partners and IBM business units to drive new and innovative technologies into IBM's products and services and definitive industry standards. The goal of his research is to significantly raise the bar on the quality of security while simultaneously easing the overhead of developing and deploying secure solutions. Dr. Rao has published widely in premier security conferences and workshops and holds numerous US and European patents. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, emeritus member of IFIP's Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology) and the Industry Advisory Board of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center. Dr. Rao obtained his doctorate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Invited Speakers

Apostolos Kokolis

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Jessica Shi

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ananda Samajdar

Georgia Institute of Technology

Anirudh Seshadri

North Carolina State University

Marzieh Lenjani

University of Virginia

Quanquan Liu

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sarada Krithivasan

Purdue University

Reena Elangovan

Purdue University

Ajay Brahmakshatriya

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Program

(all times are in Eastern Time)

October 29th, 2021
8:50 - 9:00am Introduction and Welcoming Remarks
9:00 - 09:45am Keynote: Mayflower Autonomous Ship - the future of autonomous marine exploration
Andy Stanford-Clark (IBM Corporate Strategy)
09:45 - 10:00am Break
10:00 - 10:30am Rethinking Control, Access, and Communication Mechanisms for Data-intensive Applications
Marzieh Lenjani ( University of Virginia )
10:30 - 11:00am AIrchitect: Leveraging AI to build scalable and flexible Deep Learning accelerators
Ananda Samajdar ( Georgia Institute of Technology )
11:00 - 11:30am Hardware-Aware Efficient and Robust Deep Learning
Sarada Krithivasan ( Purdue University )
11:30 - 01:30pm Lunch Break
01:30 - 02:15pm Keynote: Systems Security in a Zero Trust World: An Industrial Research Perspective
Josyula R. Rao (IBM Research)
02:15 - 02:30pm Break
02:30 - 03:00pm Precision Reconfigurable and In-Memory Computing Architectures for Efficient DNN Inference
Reena Elangovan ( Purdue University )
03:00 - 03:30pm Scalable Community Detection via Parallel Correlation Clustering
Jessica Shi ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology )
03:30 - 04:00pm Distributed Data Persistency
Apostolos Kokolis ( University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign )
04:00 - 04:15pm Break
04:15 - 04:45pm Taming the Zoo: A Unified Graph Compiler Framework for Novel Architectures
Ajay Brahmakshatriya ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology )
04:45 - 05:15pm Post-Fabrication Microarchitecture
Anirudh Seshadri ( North Carolina State University )
05:15 - 05:45pm Fast and Scalable Parallel Batch-Dynamic k-Core Decomposition
Quanquan Liu ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology )
05:45 Concluding Remarks

Organizers

Sandhya Koteshwara is a Research Staff Member at IBM T J Watson Research Center. Her research interests include secure cloud infrastructure design, embedded system security, cryptographic hardware and semiconductor supply chain integrity. She obtained her PhD degree from the University of Minnesota with a thesis focused on hardware security.

Karthik Swaminathan is a research staff member at the Efficient and Resilient Systems Group at the IBM T.J Watson Research Center. His research has a broad, cross-layer scope examining circuit, architecture and application level optimizations for improving the reliability and energy efficiency of multi core systems and accelerators. He also works on characterizing performance and reliability of IBM server-class and mainframe processors at various stages of design. He holds a PhD from Penn State University.

David Trilla is a Post-doctoral Researcher at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He has worked on real-time systems and current research interests include security and agile hardware development. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) granted by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Spain.

Augusto Vega is a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center involved in research and development work in the areas of highly-reliable power-efficient embedded designs, cognitive systems and mobile computing. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Spain.