AI Sees New Apps, Chips, says Q'comm

Researchers pick up Amsterdam team

eetimes, Aug. 16, 2017 – 

Lab work is extending machine learning to serve new applications and define new hardware architectures, said a Qualcomm researcher. He spoke on the occasion of the company acquiring Scyfer B.V., a small AI research team affiliated with University of Amsterdam that it had been working with previously.

Scyfer acted as a consulting firm, applying machine learning to industrial, IoT, banking, and mobile sectors. The group is now part of Qualcomm Research, seeking to expand machine learning in areas such as computer vision and natural language processing and exploring how emerging algorithms will impact the design of hardware accelerators.

"As the algorithms change, we think there is a space here for co-designing the neural networks and the hardware," said Jeff Gehlhaar, a vice president of technology for corporate R&D who is responsible for AI at Qualcomm.

"As these networks evolve, we are starting to see patterns in execution profiles" that can impact caching and bit precision in hardware, he said. "We're looking at the systems level to see how to make elements work together without compromising accuracy."

In a press statement, Qualcomm said that it foresees emerging uses of neural nets in areas including wireless connectivity, power management, and photography. Several companies are already applying AI to security for jobs such as detecting malware; others are using it to break through bottlenecks in semiconductor design.

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