Events Calendar

A Case for Domain-Specific Architectures and its Application to Energy-Efficient Speech Recognition

Speaker: Antonio González, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Talk Title: A Case for Domain-Specific Architectures and its Application to Energy-Efficient Speech Recognition

Abstract: Improvements in energy-efficiency is a main requirement to keep providing innovations in computing systems. The main driving forces in the past for improving energy-efficiency were based on process technology and general-purpose architectures. However, both of them are reaching a point of diminishing returns. On the other hand, domain-specific architectures offer great potential to keep delivering dramatic improvements in energy-efficient, and we believe they will become a key ingredient of future computing systems. In this talk, we will use speech recognition as a case study to illustrate this potential.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a key feature for many computing systems, and in particular for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, home devices and wearables. For instance, ASR technology is at the heart of popular applications with voice-based user interfaces for mobile devices such as Google Now, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana or Amazon Alexa. These systems require support for real-time, large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, highly-accurate, continuous speech recognition. Unfortunately, supporting fast and accurate speech recognition requires a huge computational power, which is specially challenging to attain in devices with very tight constraints in energy consumption.

In this talk, we will first review the main trends in computing and the state-of-the-art approaches for ASR and then, we will present a novel domain-specific architecture that provides dramatic improvements in terms of energy-efficiency for ASR.


Biography: Antonio Gonzalez received his Ph.D. degree from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), in Barcelona, Spain, in 1989. He joined the faculty of the Computer Architecture Department of UPC in 1986 and became a Full Professor in 2002. He was the founding director of the Intel Barcelona Research Center from 2002 to 2014.

His research has focused on computer architecture. In this area, Antonio holds 46 patents, has published over 350 research papers and has given over 100 invited talks. He has also made multiple contributions to the design of the architecture of several Intel processors.

Antonio has been program chair for ICS 2003, ISPASS 2003, MICRO 2004, HPCA 2008 and ISCA 2011, and general chair for MICRO 2008 and HPCA 2016 among other symposia. He has served on the program committees for over 100 international symposia in the field of computer architecture, and has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing, and Journal of Embedded Computing.

Antonio's awards include the award to the best student in computer engineering in Spain graduating in 1986, the 2001 Rosina Ribalta award as the advisor of the best PhD project in Information Technology and Communications, the 2008 Duran Farrell award for research in technology, the 2009 Aritmel National Award of Informatics to the Computer Engineer of the Year, the 2013 King James I award for his contributions in research on new technologies, and the 2014 ICREA Academia Award. He is an IEEE Fellow.


Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos