ECE Seminar: Prof. Thirumalai Venkatesan

Event Date: March 18, 2019
Speaker: Prof. Thirumalai Venkatesan
Speaker Affiliation: National University of Singapore
Time: 10:00 am
Location: POTR 234
Priority: No
School or Program: Electrical and Computer Engineering
College Calendar: Show

Prof. Thirumalai Venkatesan
Director, NUSNNI-NanoCore
Professor of ECE, MSE, NGS & Physics
National University of Singapore

Abstract
There are four key areas where I would like to develop multi-disciplinary experimental programs with the chance to make significant scientific and societal impact. 

These are:

  1. Quantum functionalities at material interfaces
  2. Autonomous Fabrication of Functional Thin Films
  3. Brain inspired electronics and
  4. Molecular sensors and their applications to health, energy and food technologies

However, I will briefly focus my first 30 minutes of my talk on our work in the area of low energy memories and approach to neuronal devices. CMOS based bio chips are coming to the fore and despite their mimicking neuronal circuits they still lag behind the human brain in terms of energy consumption by several orders of magnitude and it is not clear at this stage whether CMOS will be able to sustain the desired energy reduction in AI/ML processing. Alternate electronic devices more resembling the neurons would be the way of the future. I will discuss three different approaches involving organic, oxide and live neuronal devices.

Bio

Prof. T. Venkatesan is currently the Director of the Nano Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUSNNI) where he is a Professor of ECE, Physics, MSE and NGS. He wore various hats at Bell Labs and Bellcore before becoming a Professor at University of Maryland. As the inventor of the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process, he has over 740 papers and 30 patents and is globally among the top one hundred physicists (ranked at 66 in 2000) in terms of his citations (Over 41,222 with a hirsch Index of 103-Google Scholar). He has graduated over 45 PhDs, 35 Post Docs and over 35 undergraduates. He is also the founder and Chairman of Neocera, a company specializing in the area of PLD and magnetic field imaging systems. Close to 10 of the researchers (PhD students and Post Docs) under him have become entrepreneurs starting over 17 different commercial enterprises. He is a Fellow of the APS, winner of the Bellcore Award of excellence, Guest Professor at Tsinghua University, Winner of the George E. Pake Prize awarded by APS (2012), President’s gold medal of the Institute of Physics Singapore, Academician of the Asia Pacific Academy of Materials, Fellow of the World Innovation Forum, was a member of the Physics Policy Committee (Washington DC), the Board of Visitors at UMD and the Chairman, Forum of Industry and Applications of Physics at APS. He was awarded the outstanding alumnus award from two Indian Institute of Technologies- Kanpur (2015) and Kharagpur (2016), India.

2019-03-18 10:00:00 2019-03-18 11:00:00 America/Indiana/Indianapolis ECE Seminar: Prof. Thirumalai Venkatesan POTR 234