RSVP / PROGRAM

Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is an IBM Fellow and IBM Chief Scientist for Brain-inspired Computers. He is a cognitive computing pioneer who envisioned and now leads a highly successful effort to develop brain-inspired computers. The groundbreaking project is multi-disciplinary, multi-national, multi-institutional and has had worldwide scientific impact. It has been funded to the tune of $150M by DARPA, DOD, DOE, and Commercial contracts. Its resulting revolutionary computing architecture and ecosystem break from the prevailing von Neumann paradigm and constitute a foundation for new classes of ultra-low-power, compact, real-time, multi-modal sensorimotor information technology systems. Dr. Modha has also made significant contributions to IBM businesses via innovations in caching mechanisms for storage controllers, clustering algorithms for services, and coding theory for disk drives. His work has been featured in Economist, Science, New York Times, BBC, Discover, MIT Technology Report, Associated Press, Popular Mechanics, Communications of the ACM, Forbes, Fortune, and IEEE Spectrum amongst thousands of media mentions. Author of over 70 papers and inventor of over 100 patents, he has been a recipient of ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize; Misha Mahowald Prize; R&D Magazine’s 2016 Scientist of the Year; USENIX/FAST Test of Time Award; Best Paper Awards at ASYNC and IDEMI; First Place, Science/NSF International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge; IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award; R&D 100 Award; and is a Fellow of IEEE and World Technology Network. In 2013 and 2014, he was named as Best of IBM. TrueNorth Brain-inspired Processor has been accepted into the Computer History Museum. On their 40th Anniversary, EE Times named Dr. Modha amongst 10 Electronics Visionaries to Watch. Dr. Modha received BTech from IIT Bombay in 1990 and PhD from UCSD in 1995 under Professor Elias Masry's supervision.

Francesco Bullo is a Professor with the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was an EAP student at UC San Diego during 1992-93. During 1993, he worked under the supervision of Dr. Elias Masry on the convergence analysis of the sign algorithm for adaptive filtering. Since then, he has been associated with the University of Padova, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois. He served as Department Chair, IEEE CSS President and as SIAG CST Chair. His research interests focus on contraction theory, network systems and distributed control with application to robotic coordination, power grids and social networks. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM.

Dr. Onkar Dabeer leads an Applied Science team at AWS responsible for multiple AI services including Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels and Amazon Lookout for Vision. He received his PhD in 2002 at UC San Diego under the guidance Prof. Masry. Prior to his current position, Onkar held a research position at Qualcomm Research (2013-2017) and was an Associate Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (2004-2013). He is a recipient of several early career faculty awards in India, including the Homi Bhabha Fellowship and INSA Young Scientist award, and has over 50 publications and 20 patents. His current applied research interests span zero-shot/few-shot learning, continual learning, and scalable AI services.