Mustafa Ali and Tanvi Sharma

Two PhD students in Purdue University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mustafa Ali and Tanvi Sharma, have won Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships. Ali and Sharma presented their proposal titled “A Generalized Framework for Optimizing ML Workload Acceleration in Processing-in/near Memory Architectures” at the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship event held virtually on May 26, 2021. The Qualcomm judging panel selected Ali and Sharma’s project and 15 other winning proposals from over 100 proposals submitted by PhD students from top universities across the country. For a complete list of winners for 2021, visit the 2021 QIF North American Program Details website.

Ali and Sharma are both students of Kaushik Roy, the Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of ECE and Director of the Center for Brain-inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence (C-BRIC). Ali’s research interest is generally neuromorphic computing using CMOS and emerging technologies. Sharma’s research interests lie in hardware architectures for accelerating machine learning and algorithm co-design. Ali joined Roy’s Nanoelectronics Research Laboratory in 2018; Sharma joined in 2019.

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship “promotes Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and teamwork.” Qualcomm launched the program in 2009 with the goal “to enable students to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas.” Qualcomm provides winners a 1-year fellowship and mentoring from top Qualcomm engineers in the students’ fields of interest.