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The Academic Job Search: A Memoir
Part I: Submitting Applications and First-Round Interviews Interviewing for academic jobs was one of the most intellectually and socially enriching experiences that I have ever had. In a series of two blog posts, of which this is the first, I hope to demystify various...
Why We Should Include One-Shot Revision in our Review Process
Including one-shot revision in our peer review process could lead to lower overall reviewing load, better mental health for graduate students, and better overall science. Most of the top conferences in systems and architecture follow the binary decision model: the...
Multi-Modal On-Device AI: Heterogeneous Computing Once More?
What is Multi-modal AI? Prior research on developing on-device AI solutions have primarily focused on improving the TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) or TOPS/Watt of AI accelerators by leveraging sparsity, quantization, or efficient neural network architectures...
The Future of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks
Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks The key characteristic of deep learning is that accuracy empirically scales with the size of the model and the amount of training data. Over the past decade, this property has enabled dramatic improvements in the state of the art...
Computer Systems Research: The Joys, the Perils, and How to Count Beans Well
This post takes a personalized, and hence subjective, look at the joys of doing leading edge computer systems research and development. It then delves into some of the perils of this activity, including bean counting, aka bibliometic indices that are not always kind to the work in this field. I then give some high-level suggestions for how to skirt the perils and embrace the joys.
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Highlights of 2020 Security Conferences for Computer Architects – Part II
Security remains a popular research area in our conferences – MICRO-53 featured two sessions and eight papers dedicated to security. To contribute new ideas in this area, it is important for computer architects to keep up with recent developments in both...
MICRO 2020 – How “Virtual” Was It?
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives two definitions for the adjective “virtual”: (d1) “. . . made to appear to exist by the use of computer software, for example on the internet”, and (d2) “. . . almost or very nearly the thing described, so that any...
Chiplet-Based Systems
[Editor’s Note: I’m very happy to announce that Christina Delimitrou of Cornell University will be serving as the blog’s Associate Editor. Thank you, Vijay Janapa Reddi, for your amazing service in this role for the last three years!] Chip vendors...