Sankar Basu

Program Director, US National Science Foundation

Sankar Basu is a permanent Program Director at NSF/CISE Directorate and came to NSF from the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in 2002. Early in his career he served on the faculty of Stevens Institute of Technology, and had a short stint at Naval Underwater Systems Center, CT as a visiting senior scientist. He was also at the Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, and the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) for extended periods. During 2012 he served as science advisor to the US Embassy in Berlin, Germany as a State Department Embassy Science Fellow.

His NSF program portfolio includes design automation of micro and nano systems. In the past he has also worked on circuits systems signal processing and statistical machine learning.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE (2001), a Fellow of the AAAS (2010), and recipient of an SRC award (2011) for Enhancing the Mission of SRC and NSF through Collaboration.

Title: Nanotechnology inspired energy efficient computing – perspective on a grand challenge

Abstract: Several national initiatives, e.g., the nanotechnology initiative, the brain initiative, and the national strategic computing initiative have been appealed to for rescuing the computing research (and industry) from the impending crisis resulting from end of Moore’s law. To this end, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently issued a grand challenge in computing which may possibly involve new kinds of beyond silicon devices and novel non von-Neumann computing architectures. While the nature and demands of computing in the future may be shifting away from traditional applications, much of the thinking behind this grand challenge draws inspiration from the fact that the human brain can perform amazingly complex tasks with orders of magnitude lower power consumption unmatched by present day computing machines. In this talk, we will critique this approach and discuss some potential solutions being pursued by several groups both in academia and government funding agencies.