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Sunday Panels

[14:30 - 16:00] - FPGA Machine Learning Research in the Next Decade

Moderator: Andrew Putnam, Microsoft Research

Panel: Gordon Chiu: Intel, Dan Connors: University of Colorado, Phil James-Roxby: Xilinx, Farinaz Koushanfar, UCSD, Guy Lemieux: University of British Columbia

The last few years have seen a tremendous number of researchers working on Machine Learning applications and techniques for FPGAs. Conferences such as FCCM are getting many papers related to machine learning, and entire sessions are devoted to the topic. Is this a short-lived phenomenon or is this the new normal? Are we still chasing low-hanging fruit, and if so, what happens when it is gone? What research problems will remain interesting over the next five to ten years related to FPGAs and machine learning?

[16:30 - 18:00] - Identifying Startup Opportunities Within your Research

Moderator: John Lockwood

Panel: Jason Anderson, Jason Cong, Brad Hutchings, and Eric Keller

This is a panel on FPGA research - research that specifically led to, inspired, or was pulled kicking and screaming into a new company.

Each panelist has done a notable startup and now is back in academia - we'll learn how their research met an industry need at the time, how they took that startup leap and how coming back to academia changed their research agendas.

This is in many ways a retrospective on what research out of our community has impacted industry in the past through a startup - we'll also ask the panelists what they see as research-to-startup opportunities coming down the road (and yes, machine learning will probably come up).

FCCM being in Boulder, CO this year makes for a great opportunity to share these stories from our community on research driven startups. Boulder was named the #1 Best City to Start a Business in 2015 (Forbes) and is home to a vibrant startup culture with many top incubators located here including TechStars, The Founder Institute, and BoomTown. We hope to have local startup representatives in the audience to create a lively discussion complementing the exciting research we'll hear about over the next two days.