ITEE seminar: Dr Adrian Stoica, 11.00AM, Fri 05 Dec 2003

Evolving circuit designs and reconfigurable hardware for adaptation and optimization

Speaker: Dr Adrian Stoica, JPL, Pasadena USA

When: 11.00AM, Friday 05 Dec 2003

Venue: 78-622

Host: Prof. Neil Bergmann

Abstract:

  The holly grail of design automation would be to formulate
  requirements for a device or system specifications and obtain the
  design by the push of a button. For a deployable device, the vision
  is to communicate to it the new requirements and have it
  autonomously reconfigure/adapt to satisfy them optimally.

  One of the techniques taking us a step forward toward these visions
  is evolvable hardware. Evolutionary algorithms are applied as a
  search/optimization technique to generate designs that gradually
  move toward a design target. Evolved designs may lead to new,
  patentable circuits, could offer trade-offs for various
  multi-criteria optimization problems, or new configurations for a
  reconfigurable device that needs to adapt in-situ at a new mission,
  damage/degradation of own capability, or change in the
  environment. The goal of NASA/JPL work in evolvable hardware is to
  provide flexible, self-healing, adaptive and evolvable HW resources
  for long-life, survivable spacecraft enabling unprecedented missions
  at distant locations and in harsh environments.

  The talk will introduce the main aspects of evolvable hardware, and
  will present a set of examples of evolved circuits. Some of these
  circuits were evolved in simulations and then were fabricated in
  silicon. Other circuits were evolved directly on a reconfigurable
  transistor array chip, converging to satisfactory solution in only
  seconds. The talk will also present the potential implications for
  designing circuits that can use components coming from a less than
  perfect fabrication, with deviations in parameters and faults,
  etc. as well as implications for future intelligent reconfigurable
  devices.

Biography:

 
  Adrian Stoica is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the
  Biologically Inspired Technology and Systems (BITS) Group and
  Manager for Computing Devices in the Space Information Systems
  Technology Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California
  Institute of Technology. He obtained his MSEE degree from the
  Technical University of Iasi, Romania, ranking the first among the
  graduates in Applied Electronics Specialty. He received his Ph.D. in
  EECS from Victoria University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia,
  with a thesis titled "Motion learning by robot apprentices - a fuzzy
  neural approach", which was the earliest work on humanoid robot
  learning by imitation. Since early 1986 his engineering and research
  work revolved around adaptive and learning techniques for autonomous
  intelligent systems. He joined JPL in 1996 where he has been working
  along two main themes: adaptive hardware for space autonomous
  systems, including evolvable/reconfigurable hardware,
  adaptive/learning hardware and sensor fusion hardware, and
  next-generation robots, focusing on rover intelligence and robot
  sensory-motor control. His current projects in reconfigurable and
  evolvable hardware addresses reconfigurable analog/digital
  field-programmable computing, automated hardware/software co-design
  and novel search/optimization techniques. Adrian Stoica initiated
  and has chaired yearly since 1999 the NASA/DOD Conference in
  Evolvable Hardware, the main conference in the field judged by
  number of attendants and references to published papers. He was
  Conference keynote speaker at ISMVL, ANNIE, gave tutorials at GECCO
  2001 and CEC2003, and taught the first short course on Evolvable
  Hardware in the summer of 2003 at UCLA Extension. He has published
  over 70 papers in the areas of evolvable hardware, reconfigurable
  computing, fuzzy logic, neural networks, robot learning and is
  serving in the editorial board of several journals. He has received
  the 1999 JPL Lew Allen Award for Excellence (highest JPL award for
  excellence in research) and the Tudor Tanasescu Prize of the
  Romanian Academy in 2001

Contact:

Prof. Neil Bergmann, seminar host (n.bergmann@itee.uq.edu.au)
or Guido Governatori (ITEE seminar co-ordinator) (guido@itee.uq.edu.au)

ITEE seminar web page: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~seminar

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