Tuesday / CS Seminar

January 17 / 12:00 PM

Hybrid / Mudd 3514

Title: Controlling (ML-based) Computing Systems

Speaker: Henry 'Hank' Hoffmann, University of Chicago

Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92533030242

Livestream: https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=95223b0f-51a2-4e85-a592-af480134679c

Abstract: Modern computing systems must meet multiple---often conflicting---goals; e.g., high-performance and low energy consumption. The current state-of-practice involves ad hoc, heuristic solutions to such system management problems that offer no formally verifiable behavior and must be rewritten or redesigned wholesale as new computing platforms and constraints evolve. In this talk, I will discuss my research on building self-aware computing systems that combine machine learning and control theory to handle system goals and constraints in a fundamental way, starting with rigorous mathematical models and ending with real software and hardware implementations that have formally analyzable behavior and can be re-purposed to address new problems as they emerge. I will first cover methodology for building these systems and then show how they can be applied to control accuracy/resource tradeoffs for ML-based computations in both scientific computing and low-power sensing.

Biography: Henry Hoffmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He received the President's Aware for Early Career Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2019. He was granted early tenure in 2018. He is a member of the informal ASPLOS Hall of Fame. He has a Test of Time Honorable Mention from FSE 2021 for his work on Loop Perforation (an early project on approximate computing). He received a DOE Early Career Award in 2015. At Chicago he leads the Self-aware Computing group (or SEEC project) and conducts research on adaptive techniques for power, energy, accuracy, and performance management in computing systems. He also founded the UChicago CS department's EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) committee in 2020. He completed a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT where his research on self-aware computing was named one of ten "World Changing Ideas" by Scientific American in December 2011. As a Masters student he worked on MIT's Raw processor, an early multicore system. Along with other members of the Raw team, he spent several years at Tilera Corporation, a startup which commercialized the Raw architecture and created one of the first manycores (Tilera was sold for $130M in 2014). In 1999, he received his BS in Mathematical Sciences with highest honors and highest distinction from UNC Chapel Hill.