ECE Seminar Series
The seminar series explores cutting-edge research in all areas of ECE, facing the grand challenges of our time. It focuses on a wide range of topics in ECE, including microelectronics, photonics and unconventional computing (both quantum and non-quantum) in the post-Moore era, and the theory and applications of machine learning and AI. The series will feature some of the most promising and established researchers in the field, and provide a unique opportunity for participants to learn about the latest developments and engage in discussions with invited experts and ECE graduate students. Additionally, it will promote diversity by featuring a diverse range of speakers and perspectives, ensuring the broad accessibility of the latest ideas and breakthroughs.
Series Committee Members – Faculty: Haewon Jeong (Chair), Kerem Camsari, Nina Miolane, Galan Moody and Graduate Student Association: Ozgur Guldogan, Monsij Biswal
Upcoming at the ECE Seminar Series
More to Come!
Past ECE Distinguished Lectures at the ECE Seminar Series
Melanie Weber, Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics & Science, Harvard
"Exploiting Geometric Structure in Machine Learning and Optimization"
Weber's Talk – June 5 (Mon) @ 2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001
Melanie is an Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics and of Computer Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on utilizing geometric structure in data for the design of efficient Machine Learning and Optimization methods. In 2021-2022, she was a Hooke Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford. Previously, she received her PhD from Princeton University (2021), held visiting positions at MIT and the Simons Institute in Berkeley, and interned in the research labs of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. In addition to her academic work, she is the Chief Scientist of the Legal Artificial Intelligence start-up Claudius Legal Intelligence, where she leads a team of researchers in developing Trustworthy Machine Learning tools for legal analytics.
Adam Smith, Professor of Computer Science, Boston University
"Privacy in Machine Learning and Statistical Inference"
Smith's Talk – May 19 (Fri) @ 2:00pm | Harold Frank Hall (HFH), Rm. 1104
Adam Smith is a professor of computer science at Boston University. From 2007 to 2017, he served on the faculty of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Penn State. His research interests lie in data privacy and cryptography, and their connections to machine learning, statistics, information theory, and quantum computing. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 2004 and has held postdoc and visiting positions at the Weizmann Institute of Science, UCLA, Boston University and Harvard. His work received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2009; a Theory of Cryptography Test of Time award in 2016; the Eurocrypt 2019 Test of Time award; the 2017 Gödel Prize; and the 2021 Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM.
John Sipe, Professor of Physics at University of Toronto
"Thinking About Squeezed States"
Sipe’s Talk – May 5 (Fri) @ 2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001
John Sipe is a Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto. His research is focused on theoretical issues in quantum optics and condensed matter physics, with recent work on the foundations of optical response, coherent control effects, and nonlinear quantum optics.
Sayeef Salahuddin, TSMC Distinguished Professor, UC Berkeley
"CMOS+X: Integrated Ferroelectric Devices for Energy Efficient Electronics"
Salahuddin's Talk – April 28 (Fri), 2023 @2:00pm | Engineering Science Bldg (ESB), Rm. 1001
S. Salahuddin is the TSMC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California Berkeley. His group explores physics for low power electronic and spintronic devices. He is mostly known for the discovery of the Negative Capacitance effect that shows substantial promise for logic, memory and energy storage devices. Salahuddin received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama. Salahuddin also received several other awards including the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the IEEE Nanotechnology Early Career Award, the Young Investigator Awards from the Airforce Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office, and the IEEE George E Smith Award. (more...)
Urbashi Mitra, Professor of ECE at the University of Southern California
"How Designing an Application-specific Algorithm Led to a New Form of Reinforcement Learning"
Mitra's Talk – March 10 (Fri), 2023 @2:00pm | Harold Frank Hall (HFH), Rm. 1104
Urbashi Mitra received the B.S. and the M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Dr. Mitra is currently the Gordon S. Marshall Professor in Engineering at the University of Southern California with appointments in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science. She was the inaugural Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multi-scale Communications. She has been a member of the IEEE Information Theory Society's Board of Governors (2002-2007, 2012-2017), the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Committee on Signal Processing for Communications and Networks (2012-2016), the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Awards Board (2017-2018), and the Chair/Vice-Chair of the IEEE Communication Theory Technical Committee (2017-2020). Dr. Mitra is a Fellow of the IEEE. (more...)
John Martinis, Professor of Physics at UC, Santa Barbara
"My Trek from Fundamental to Industrial Research: Quantum Systems Engineering"
Martinis' Talk – Feb 17, 2023 (Fri) @2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001
John Martinis did pioneering experiments in superconducting qubits in the mid 1980’s for his PhD thesis. He has worked on a variety of low temperature device physics during his career, focusing on quantum computation since the late 1990s. He was awarded the London Prize in Low temperature physics in 2014 for his work in this field. From 2014 to 2020 he worked at Google to build a useful quantum computer, culminating in a quantum supremacy experiment in 2019. He was awarded the John Stewart Bell prize in 2021.
Justin Solomon, Associate Professor of EECS at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Volumetric Methods for Modeling, Deformation, and Correspondence"
Solomon's Talk – Feb 3 (Fri), 2023 @2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001
Justin Solomon is an associate professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He leads the Geometric Data Processing group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which studies problems at the intersection of geometry, large-scale optimization, and applications in machine learning and computer graphics.
Dr. Masoud Mohseni, Senior Research Scientist at Google Quantum AI Laboratory
"Quantum-inspired Nonlocal Monte Carlo for Optimization and Sampling"
Mohseni's Talk – Jan 20 (Fri), 2023 @2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001
Dr. Masoud Mohseni is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was formerly a research scientist and a principal investigator at the Research Lab of Electronics at MIT, where he was also a scientific consultant at BBN Technologies on unconventional computing. His current research addresses some of the hard problems at the interface of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and statistical physics. He leads the development of quantum-inspired heuristic algorithms at Google. He led the development and management of the open-source software platform known as "TensorFlow Quantum," which was launched in 2020 (more...)
Past ECE Seminar Series Talks
Jennifer Volk, PhD Candidate, ECE, UC Santa Barbara
"Circuit-Architecture Co-Optimizations for Superconductor Electronics"
Volk’s Talk – Apr 21 (Fri) @ 2:00pm | Engineering Science Bldg (ESB), Rm. 1001
Jennifer is a 4th-year Computer Engineering Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, and a research affiliate at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. She received her M.S. in Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara in 2021 and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UC Santa Cruz in 2016. Her work has received numerous awards, including an IEEE Micro Top Pick in 2021, which is awarded to the top 12 papers in computer architecture that year, an IEEE Micro Top Pick Honorable Mention in 2022, and the Best Student Paper runner-up in electronics award at the Applied Superconductivity Conference in 2022. She is also the recipient of the university-wide Graduate Opportunity Fellowship for 2022-23.
