Jason Cong, distinguished chancellor’s professor of computer science, and Song-Chun Zhu, professor of statistics and computer science, are part of a new multi-university microelectronics research center that aims to dramatically speed up computer performance.
The Center on Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory is headquartered at the University of Virginia and includes research groups from eight universities. The center is seeking to overcome a design feature that has been present in computers since 1945 that holds up computing speed and performance.
Cong and Zhu, both computer scientists in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, will receive $1.85 million in research funding for projects aimed at fixing this design feature.
Cong will design new computer chip architectures and affiliated software and hardware systems to improve computing and speed in memory and storage. He will also demonstrate the advantage of those systems on big-data applications, such as machine learning and computational genomics.
Zhu will design new algorithms for emerging intelligent systems, such as computer vision in video analysis, and for cognitive robots, which use artificial intelligence to learn from experiences. He will also analyze the components in computer sensing, perception, reasoning and planning, with an emphasis on speeding up the movement of data through computer systems.