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Associate Professor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Duke University

Brain-Inspired Computing: The Extraordinary Voyages in Known and Unknown Worlds

Abstract:  The human brain is the most sophisticated organ that nature ever builds. Building a machine that can function like a human brain, indubitably, is the ultimate dream of a computer architect. Although we have not yet fully understood the working mechanism of human brains, the part that we have learned in the past seventy years already guided us to many remarkable successes in computing applications, e.g., artificial neural network and machine learning. The recently emerged research on “neuromorphic computing”, which stands for hardware acceleration of brain-inspired computing, has become one of the most active areas in computer engineering. This presentation starts with a background introduction of neuromorphic computing, followed by two examples of hardware acceleration schemes of learning and neural network algorithms on IBM TrueNorth Chip and memristor-based computing engine, respectively. At the end, we will share our prospects on the future technology challenges and advances of this exciting area.

Biography:  Dr. Yiran Chen received B.S and M.S. (both with honor) from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2005. After five years in industry, he joined University of Pittsburgh in 2010 as Assistant Professor and then promoted to Associate Professor in 2014, held Bicentennial Alumni Faculty Fellow. He now is Associate Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University and serving as the co-director of Duke Center for Evolutionary Intelligence, focusing on the research of new memory and storage systems, machine learing and neuromorphic computing, and mobile computing systems. Dr. Chen has published one book, a dozen book chapters, and about 300 technical papers. He has been granted 91 US and international patents with other 11 pending applications. He is the associate editor of IEEE TCAD, IEEE D&T, IEEE ESL, ACM JETC, and served on the technical and organization committees of more than 40 international conferences. He received 4 best paper awards from ISQED, ISLPED, GLSVLSI, ESWEEK, and over a dozen nominations from premier international conferences. He is the receipent of NSF CAREER award, ACM SIGDA outstanding new faculty award, and was the invitee of 2013 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium of National Academy of Engineering.