Event Date
Professor Jan Rabaey
University of California, Berkeley
Over the past decades, we have seen computing evolve from an isolated and centralized endeavor to an environment that exploits the heterogeneity of geographically distributed resources to dynamically execute parallel and distributed applications. The heterogeneity spans from massively parallel compute centers executing complex generative AI models to tiny wirelessly-connected sensors embedded in robotics, self-driving cars, the environment and the human body. In a sense, the world around us is being transformed into an all-embracing computing network that provides intelligent assessment, helps manage resources and operates robotic entities, all while intimately keeping the human in the loop (the “compute continuum” and the “Mirror World”). This evolution is rapidly and exponentially accelerating at all levels of the compute hierarchy. Yet that growth is most likely to be stunted by energy limitations. Already today the demand for computational power exceeds availability as well as the capability of delivering that power to the right place at the right time. In this presentation, we explore how technology innovation can help to address some of these concerns with diverging solutions for the high-performance platforms and the distributed sensory systems. In the end though, it is only a system-level perspective – considering the compute continuum as a connected dynamic distributed and evolutionary system – that will deliver a sustainable long-term solution.
Bio
AI-generated content may be incorrect.Jan is a Professor in the Graduate School in the EECS Department the University of California at Berkeley, after being the holder of the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship at the same institute for over 30 years. He is a founding director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and the Berkeley Ubiquitous SwarmLab, and has served as the Electrical Engineering Division Chair at Berkeley twice. In 2019, he also became the consulting CTO of the System-Technology Co-Optimization (STCO) Division of IMEC, Belgium.
Prof. Rabaey has made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including low power integrated circuits, advanced wireless systems, mobile devices, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing. Some of the systems he helped envision include the infoPad (a forerunner of the iPad), PicoNets and PicoRadios (IoT avant-la-lettre), the Swarm (IoT on steroids), Brain-Machine interfaces and the Human Intranet. His current interests include the conception of the next-generation distributed systems, as well as the exploration of the interaction between the cyber and the biological worlds.
He is the primary author of the influential “Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective” textbook that has served to educate hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. He is the recipient of numerous awards among which the 2009 EDAA lifetime achievement award and the 2025 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and has been involved in a broad variety of start-up ventures.