Mark Horowitz

Professor and Director
Computer Systems Laboratory
Electrical Engineering / Computer Science
Stanford University, California, USA
Webpage

 

 

 

 

Thursday, 17 December 2009 (14h00-14h45), EPFL Polydôme

Electrical Engineering: Where the Physical World meets the Virtual World

One of the joys of being an EE is the ability to change the "principle problems" of the field as technology and societal needs change. Over the past century EE has changed focus multiple times. Stanford's EE was created to help move power from Hoover Dam to the west, then moved to radio and radar. From there it moved to digital communication / information theory and solid state. This lead to the growth in IC research, and the focus changed to explore the explosion in computing systems and the general IT area. With the rapid decrease in cost of electronic systems and the maturing of the underlying technology, we are now in for another transition in the focus of EE. We are moving from the creation of the underlying IT technology, to exploiting it to better connect the rapidly growing world of information (the virtual world), with the physical world. Devices (sensors, actuators, photonics, nano etc) and systems (cameras, medical instruments, environmental sensing, smart power control, etc) at this interface are already critical and will grow in importance in the near future. This research area is broad enough to energize most areas of EE, but will especially push work in modern signal processing / extracting information from data, system design (especially embedded systems), and creating improved sensing technology.

About the speaker:

Mark Horowitz is the Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department and the Yahoo! Founders Professor of the School of Engineering at Stanford University. In addition he is Chief Scientist at Rambus Inc. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Science. Dr. Horowitz's research interests are quite broad and span using EE and CS analysis methods to problems in molecular biology to creating new design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits.

Watch the presentation video

Download presentation slides (2.5 MB pdf)