First Place: Raúl Valencia

Raúl Valencia is a software engineer with a Ph.D. in Neural Networks working towards the simplification of large models. He developed a framework of neuro evolved binary neural networks named BiSUNA that can be deployed onto FPGA using OpenCL. Before his postgraduate studies, Raúl worked in iOS mobile development, web plugins, and enterprise mail systems. He is an avid follower of blockchain technologies and a promoter of functional programming patterns using the Haskell language. Alongside his technical expertise, he is a neerk passionate about videogames that attends the gym only to eat more chocolates. (PS: neerk = nerd + geek)

Second Place: Dimitrios Danopoulos

Dimitrios Danopoulos is a PhD student at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is working in the Microlab laboratory of ECE-NTUA with main interests in Machine Learning/Deep Learning, HPC systems, and hardware acceleration through FPGAs. He has also worked for several European H2020 projects such as VineyardH2020 in which he designed accelerators for FPGAs. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, playing the guitar, and taking artistic photos with his DSLR.

Third Place: Xinyu Chen

Xinyu Chen is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the computer science department, National University of Singapore and supervised by Prof. Bingsheng He. His research interests include hardware accelerator, hardware-software co-design, graph processing, and database systems.  Now, he is working on building an FPGA-accelerated ultra-low latency in-network processing system. 

Victor Altamirano is a developer and engineer with extensive experience in embedded systems. On the side, he develops projects based on Microcontrollers, FPGA and Image Recognition (CV), AI (With TensorFlow, Pytorch and Sklearn), and cloud development tools.

Jinin K Jose is a Hardware Design Engineer. She joined LightSpeedAI Labs one year before and is working on High-Speed PCB Designs. She holds a Master's degree in VLSI and Embedded Systems and a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication.

Nevil is a Software Architect in the startup LightSpeedAI Labs. He works on optimizing High-Performance Computing and AI algorithms on FPGAs. He holds a BS-MS in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali.

Rohin Y, founder-CEO of LightSpeedAI Labs is a Researcher-Engineer with a PhD in Cosmology (computational), Masters in Physics, and Bachelors in EE. He is passionate about bringing multidisciplinary projects to life.

Third Place: Team MAAX

Yu-da Ju is a graduate student studying electronics engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan and is also a member of professor Huang’s ADAR Lab. He is doing research in software and hardware acceleration of AI models, model compression, and other AI-related fields.

Xuan Hong Li is currently a graduate student at the Institute of Electronics, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He is a member of professor Juinn Dar Huang’ s ADAR Lab. His current research interests include hardware accelerator design for machine learning and computer vision for deep learning.

Shih-Yu Wei is a first-year graduate student at the Institute of Electronics, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. His research interests are CNN accelerator development and computer vision-based on deep learning, including visual recognition and image super-resolution.

I-Hao Tseng is currently a graduate student at National Chiao Tung University majoring in Electronics Engineering. He is a member of professor Juinn Dar Huang’s ADAR Lab. His interests in research range from object classification, detection, multiple objects tracking to CNN hardware architecture design.

Dr. Juinn Dar Huang is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Electronics Engineering & the Institute of Electronics, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He served as the Deputy General Manager at the Program Office of AI Research, Taiwan from 2017- 2018. He received the Outstanding Teaching Awards of the University in 2014 and 2018. His current research interests include hardware accelerator design for machine learning, microprocessor design, design automation for biochips, and electronic design automation. Dr. Huang is currently a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, and Phi Tau Phi. Dr. Huang spent the past two decades doing his best to make his students more creative, incisive, initiative, and visionary. He will probably do the same for the next two decades.

First Place: Ussama Zahid

Ussama Zahid is an Electrical Engineer and researcher working at the intersection of Deep Learning and Hardware Design or in simple terms "Edge AI" for 3+ years. He completed his undergraduate from NUST, Pakistan in 2019 and now is looking forward to Masters, PhD and research-oriented opportunities. He loves working with hardware-software co-design of CPUs, GPUs, and algorithm specific accelerators on FPGAs. His hobbies include chess, Rubik's cubes, traveling, and swimming.

Second Place: Sambit Mohapatra

Sambit Mohapatra works as a system engineer with Valeo. Apart from his regular job, he also works on research projects in the field of real-time artificial intelligence for lidar-based perception systems. His research interest lies in making state of the art deep neural networks suitable for deployment on small resource-constrained embedded systems. Almost everything related to embedded systems and artificial intelligence interests him. While not working or tinkering with development boards, he enjoys nice long walks and playing cricket.

Third Place: Amin Kalantar and Philp Brisk

Amin Kalantar has received his B.Sc. degree in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2017. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in computer science at the University of California, Riverside under the supervision of Prof. Philip Brisk. His research interests include AI hardware acceleration, reconfigurable computing, and high level synthesis.

Philip Brisk received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Computer Science in 2006. From 2006-2009 he was a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL in Switzerland, and since 2009 he has been with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include FPGAs and reconfigurable systems, design automation, and application-specific processor design.