News Archive

The C³SR post-doctoral Snigdha Chaturvedi will join the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Santa Cruze in Spring 2018.

The C³SR team wins 1st place for the Nvidia AI City Challenge for traffic camera object detection and classification.

Wen-mei Hwu gave the keynote address at ISLPED 2017.

Deming Chen presented at the 2017 ShanghaiTech Workshop on Emerging Devices, Circuits and Systems, cognitive computing and development of AI.

Lav R. Varshney presented at the 2017 International Association for World Englishes (IAWE).

Xiou Ge, Jinjun Xiong, and Lav R. Varshney presented during a workshop at ICCC 2017.

The C³SR team won First Place at the 2017 International Hardware Design Contest at the DAC conference.

The C³SR team on top of the Story Cloze Test competition's leader-board, cogcomp.

C³SR faculty, students, and IBM collaborators participated in a one-day retreat on April 15, 2017 for the purpose of reviewing progress and refining next steps. Co-directors Wen-mei Hwu and Jinjun Xiong presented the state of the center. This was then followed by demonstrations and discussions on three projects: DISCVR Document Introspection System for CognitiVe Research), mapping curated datasets of required learning concepts/goals to science projects (part of CELA), inference workload for Video Content Analysis with FPGA acceleration.

Wen-mei Hwu demonstrates the power of new computational models in the ECE building.

As part of his visit to the UIUC campus, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, and his staff  met with the C³SR faculty and students on February 1, 2017. Jensen offered his vision for NVIDIA as a leading core technology company in the age of artificial intelligence.

C³SR co-directors Wen-mei Hwu and Jinjun Xiong along with C³SR faculty and students presented the C³SR vision and research activities to the NVIDIA visitors. Jensen was very actively engaged and participated with many insightful comments and questions throughout. During the discussion of the CELA (Creative Experiential Learning Advisor), Cognitive Application Builder (CAB), and Near Memory Acceleration (NMA) projects, Jensen commented that the center's projects were "sufficiently ambitious and sufficiently useful. Perfect intersection between applied and fundamental research"

C³SR's executive sponsor, Dr. Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, Director of IBM Research visited C³SR and did a full-day review with C³SRs technical agenda and project progress. Dr. Krishna applauded the team for the super-charged speed to carry out so many exciting projects.

Debarun Bhattacharjya and Lav R. Varshney presented at INFORMS Annual Meeting in Nashville November 13-16, 2016.

Advancing the Scientific Frontiers of Cognitive Systems

Cognitive systems learn from vast amounts of complex, ambiguous information and help us do amazing things, such as treat disease, manage finances, and transform commerce. Underneath these systems, the core fields of science & technology -from artificial intelligence to brain science to computer architecture to cognitive science- are advancing rapidly and achieving breakthroughs not envisioned even a few years ago. IBM Research and its network of scientific partners are pursuing some of the hardest technical problems while creating practical solutions that make a difference to the world.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) is working with IBM to develop optimized systems the stack of applications, accelerators, software, hardware and networking needed to support larger and more complex cognitive workloads. The goal of the IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C³SR) is optimized distributed architectures that can improve and scale the performance of cognitive systems tenfold (and beyond for some advanced cognitive workloads). I am very excited about the opportunity to combine the world-class heterogeneous computing architecture, parallel algorithm, natural language processing, and image recognition expertise at Illinois with the cutting edge cognitive application and computing systems technologies at IBM to embark on this exciting project that can potentially revolutionize computing and dramatically enrich our lives, says Wen-Mei Hwu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois.

On September 18-20, 2016, C³SR faculties and students attended IBMs Cognitive Computing Colloquium held at IBMs Thomas J. Watson Research Headquarter, Yorktown Heights, New York. During this event, IBM announced the formation of IBMs Cognitive Horizons Network, where C³SR is an integral part of. IBMs Cognitive Horizons Network is advancing the science behind cognitive computing by working with the best minds.

During the colloquium, many C³SR students presented their research work and had many productive interactions with IBM researchers and other Cognitive Horizons Network centers faculties and students. Some pictures from that event.