ABSTRACT: The Internet of Things (IoT) has been hailed as the next frontier of innovation in which our everyday objects are connected in ways that improve our lives and transform industries. Still, significant vital challenges remain in achieving this potential due to the inherent resource-constrained nature of IoT systems, coupled with the computing power and data gathering requirements of Big Data applications. This context can result in degraded and unreliable behavior of IoT nodes, or a global energy crisis when IoT is fully deployed in the future. In this talk, Prof. Atienza will first discuss the challenges of ultra-low power (ULP) Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) design and communication in edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) nodes for Big Data analytics. Then, the opportunities for edge AI systems to conceive the next generation of IoT applications while respecting the privacy constraints of users will be discussed. This new trend of edge AI-based MPSoC architectures must combine new ULP multi-core embedded systems with neural network accelerators. Moreover, they need to include energy-scalable software layers to selectively communicate privacy-preserving information from the users, to gracefully adapt the energy consumption while re-training on the fly to personalize the IoT application outputs.

BIO: David Atienza is Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and leads the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from UCM (Spain) and IMEC (Belgium). His research interests focus on system-level design methodologies for energy-efficient multi-processor system-on-chip architectures (MPSoC) and next-generation smart embedded systems (particularly wearables) for the Internet of Things (IoT) era. In these fields, he is co-author of more than 350 publications, 14 patents, and received several best paper awards in top conferences. He also was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. Dr. Atienza received, among others, the DAC Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Member, as well as Chair of EDAA for the period 2022-2023.