Mahdi Nikdast

Colorado State University

Making the Edge Smart Again with Photonic Neural Processing

Abstract

Edge intelligence is becoming increasingly important as visual sensors are deployed in power- and latency-constrained environments where sending raw data to cloud or backend processors is inefficient or impractical. In this invited talk, I will discuss our recent efforts toward making visual sensors smarter through integrated photonic neural processing. The talk will present a near-sensor computing framework that combines front-end readout circuitry with photonic neural processor designs to enable low-latency, energy-efficient processing directly at the sensor edge. I will highlight how photonic devices and architectures can perform key neural-network operations with high parallelism and low power consumption, reducing the burden on conventional electronic processors. Through examples from our group’s work, I will discuss the opportunities and challenges in co-designing sensors, circuits, and photonic accelerators for next-generation intelligent edge systems.

Biography

Mahdi Nikdast is an Assistant Professor and an Endowed Rockwell-Anderson Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins. He received his Ph.D. in Electronic and Computer Engineering from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, in 2014. From 2014 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and Polytechnique Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Prof. Nikdast and his students have published numerous papers in refereed journals and international conference publications, and across different areas of VLSI, EDA, Photonics, Embedded Systems, Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), and Computer Architecture. He has edited a book on Silicon Photonics for High-Performance Computing and Beyond, published by Taylor and Francis Group in 2022, and another book on Photonic Interconnects for Computing Systems: Understanding and Pushing Design Challenges, published by River Publishers in 2017. Prof. Nikdast currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (IEEE TVLSI), and has served on the TPC of various international conferences, including DAC, OFC, DATE, ICCAD, ESWEEK, NOCS, etc. His research interests are at the intersection of integrated photonics, silicon photonics, and high-performance computing systems. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

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