Sunday, March 16, 2014

Intelligent Robots, Uncertain< T >, K2, and the Olympic Oval @ ASPLOS 2014

I enjoyed attending the conference, meeting and talking to new and old connections in both academia and industry. I wanted to share some of the highlights for me and I hope you find them interesting.

Keynote: Neuromorphic Processing: A New Frontier in Scaling Computer Architecture 
Jeff Gehlhaar, Qualcomm
This is one of the most exciting and inspiring talks I've attended. I think Qualcomm's forward-looking research in neuromorphic processing is in line with quite a few research ideas built upon specialization and accelerators. I believe that these are viable solutions to help the architecture community combat important challenges such as the utilization, dark silicon, and enable hardware-software co-design to provide greater efficiency. I also am very intrigued by this talk to explore different application space that spark innovative ideas, such as combining machine learning with sensory devices using a expanded mobile platform. I've already told more than 10 non-computer-geeks about the cool robot video and cannot wait for Qualcomm to reveal more about what they are doing next.

Uncertain< T >: A First-Order Type for Uncertain Data James Bornholt (Australian National Universit); Todd Mytkowicz (Microsoft Research); Kathryn S. McKinley (University of Texas at Austin/Microsoft Research) 
I thought the lightning 90s introduction for this talk did a great job piquing the interest of the audience. I probably would have not wanted to attend the talk without the convincing GPS use cases the authors thoughtfully put together because at first glance, this material is too "mathy" for my taste. However, the authors made it compelling to use this new data abstraction to express and compute using uncertain<t> in applicable applications. 

K2: A Mobile Operating System for Heterogeneous Coherence Domains Felix Xiaozhu Lin (Rice University); Zhen Wang (Rice University); Lin Zhong (Rice University) 
This paper was selected as one of the best papers this year and it is well deserved. K2 is on the track to solve one of the most important problems that the operating systems community is facing, a heterogeneous coherence domain. The presenter was articulate, and was a great story teller, leading the audience from one problem to the next, showing insights at every step. I really enjoyed it even when I'm an architect, and not an OS expert by trade.

The Utah Olympic Oval
Kudos to the event organizers to be so creative and take us to skate on the Olympic-quality ice rink and have staff members who are at the ready to teach us non-Olympians ice skating and curling. I had so much fun learning how to throw the stone, how to sweep, and most importantly, how not to run and fall on the ice during curling! 

Overall, I throughly enjoyed the conference and I hope you did too!


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