Developing and demonstrating disruptive ultra-low-power Edge-AI systems

Prof. Dr. Henk Corporaal (TU/e) is Full Professor in Embedded System Architectures at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in The Netherlands. He has gained a MSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of Groningen, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering, in the area of Computer Architecture, from Delft University of Technology. Corporaal has co-authored over 500 journal and conference papers. Furthermore he invented a new class of VLIW architectures, the Transport Triggered Architectures, which is used in several commercial products, and by many research groups. His research is on low power multi-processor, heterogenous processing architectures, their programmability, and the predictable design of soft- and hard real-time systems. This includes research and design of embedded system architectures, including CGRAs, SIMD, VLIW and GPUs, on accelerators, the exploitation of all kinds of parallelism, fault-tolerance, approximate computing, architectures for machine and deep learning, optimizations and mapping of deep learning networks, and the (semi-)automated mapping of applications to these architectures.

Prof. Dr. ir. Said Hamdioui (TUD) is Chair Professor on Dependable and Emerging Computer Technologies, Head of the Quantum and Computer Engineering department, and also serving as Head of the Computer Engineering Laboratory (CE-Lab) of the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He is also co-founder and CEO of Cognitive-IC, a start-up focusing on hardware dependability solutions. He has more than 18 years of experience in design, test and reliability of ICs. He received a MSC in EE and PhD both with distinction from TUD. He is currently leading dependable and emerging computing technologies at the Computer Engineering Laboratory of the TUD.

Dr. ir. Mario Konijnenburg (IMEC) received an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands in 1993. A Ph.D. degree was received from Delft University of Technology in 1999 on Automatic Test Pattern Generation for Sequential Circuits. He joined Philips Research / NXP Semiconductors and worked on methodologies to improve testability of designs. Currently, he is chip architect and R&D manager of the IC-design group at IMEC in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, targeting chip research for bio-medical applications covering SoC design, sensors, stimulators, power, and (RF) communication.

Dr. ir. Manil Dev Gomony (TU/e) received his PhD and Masters in Electrical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology in 2015 and Linkoping University in 2010, respectively. He is an assistant professor at TU/e and a researcher at the Bell Laboratories of Alcatel Lucent. His research interests are confined to different aspects of embedded systems such as application-specific processors, ultra-low-power circuits, memory subsystems, scheduling algorithms, and embedded software.

Dr. Amir Zjajo (Innatera) is co-founder of Innatera Nanosystems B.V., and serves as its Chief Scientist. Prior to that, he was a member of research staff in the Mixed Signal Circuits and Systems Group at Philips Research Laboratories between 2000 and 2006, and subsequently, with Corporate Research at NXP Semiconductors until 2009. He joined the Delft University of Technology the same year, and was responsible for leading research into intelligent systems within a range of EU-funded research projects. He is the author of several books on circuits and systems, and he is the editor of Real-Time Multi-Chip Neural Network for Cognitive Systems (River Publishers, 2019). Dr. Zjajo has published more than 90 papers in referenced journals and conference proceedings in the areas of mixed-signal VLSI design, and biomedical and neuromorphic circuits and systems, and holds more than 20 patents or patent pending. He received the M.Sc. and DIC degrees from the Imperial College London, London, U.K., in 2000, and the PhD. degree from Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands in 2010, all in electrical engineering. His research interests include energy-efficient circuit and system design for on-chip machine learning and inference, and bionic electronic circuits for autonomous cognitive systems. Dr. Zjajo won best/excellence paper award at BioDevices’15 and LifeTech’19. He is a senior member of IEEE.

Prof. Elisabetta Chicca (RUG) received a Ph.D. in Natural Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ, Physics department) and in Neuroscience from the Neuroscience Center Zurich in 2006. E. Chicca has carried out her research as a Postdoctoral fellow (2006-2010) and as a Group Leader (2010-2011) at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (University of Zurich and ETH Zurich) working on development of neuromorphic signal processing and sensory systems. Between 2011 and 2020 she lead the Neuromorphic Behaving Systems research group at Bielefeld University (Faculty of Technology and Cognitive Interaction Technology Center of Excellence, CITEC). In 2021 she joined the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen as full professor and chair of Bio-Inspired Circuits and Systems. Her current interests are in the development of CMOS models of cortical circuits for brain-inspired computation, learning in spiking CMOS neural networks and memristive systems, bio-inspired sensing (vision, touch, olfaction, audition, active electrolocation) and motor control. She combines these research approaches with the aim of understanding neural computation by constructing behaving agents which can robustly operate in real-world environments. She is recipient of EU H2020 funding in various programs (ICT, MSCA, FETPROACT), NWO and DFG funding. E. Chicca contributed to the creation and launching of a new IOP journal (Nueromorphic Computing and Engineering) to promote multi-disciplinary publications in her field and futher supports the journal as Executive Editorial Board member.