I'm Gelara, a forward-thinking computer architecture master's student from Iran. My focus lies in Approximate Computing, Bio-inspired Computing, and Brain Interface Computing.

Amila received her Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from the University of Sarajevo in Electrical Engineering within Computer Science and Informatics Department in 2006, 2009, respectively. In academic year 2007/2008 she received Fulbright Visiting Student Award and joined Embedded Systems and Architectures Lab at University California, Riverside as Junior Researcher. In 2010, she spent 1 month at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana as a visiting academic. Then, she received MEXT scholarship in 2010 and spend 3 and half years in beautiful Tokyo, where she completed her Ph.D. at Keio University in 2013.

Her primary area of interest is Computer Architecture, including Reconfigurable Architectures, High Performance Computing and Heterogeneous Computing. Her past research mainly focused on finding new ways to accelerate compute-intensive parts of an algorithm by means of offloading it to an FPGA. The challenge is to take advantage of knowledge about an architecture and adapt the algorithm to the architecture rather than the other way around. Her PhD research focused on developing architectures and methodologies that help to reduce the execution time of Cyclic Redundancy Check algorithms, particularly those implemented using FPGAs, and iSCSI protocol implementation.

In recent years, she has expanded her research to include Digital Signal Processing, Computer Vision, Image Segmentation, Machine Learning to name a few.

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My advisor is Prof Sarita Adve. My research interests include Error-Efficient Computing, Approximate Computing, Hardware Resiliency and Software Testing. The overarching theme of my dissertation work is enabling reliable, low-cost and efficient computing by allowing controlled errors in the system. My work aims to explore such opportunities in emerging workloads and build an ecosystem to formalize and automate the application of error-efficient computing techniques. I am among the young researchers selected to participate in the 2018 Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

Before joining UIUC, I was a CPU/Silicon validation engineer at Intel for five years, where I won a divisional award for key contributions in validating new industry standard CPU features. Prior to that I worked for 1.5 years at Qualcomm on the architectural verification of the Snapdragon processor. I completed my MS in ECE from North Carolina State University. My undergraduate degree, in Electrical Engineering, is from the University of Madras in India.