Research Lab ARC is looking for volunteers for fall semester

 Dear EE majors.

Our research lab ARC, led by Dr. Greg Stitt, is looking for volunteers willing to dedicate at least three hours of time each week, where the enrollment of research credits may also be possible. As of now, we are primarily looking for students, either undergraduate or graduate, to help us form the foundation of a large up-and-coming project within the realm of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

 

Overall, the project aims to explore how we can employ FPGA devices to create a specialized computer architecture for what is known as genetic programming (GP). In brief, genetic programming is a strategy that uses techniques inspired by biological evolution and natural selection to automatically solve problems from high-level objectives, without a user having to know or specify the structure of a solution in advance. Note that achieving such an ability in general is no small feat––for perspective, this is essentially the overarching goal of the fields of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

 

Genetic programming has been actively researched for almost three decades, and has been applied to thousands of applications, with some very notable successes. Although quite mature, there is still much to explore in regard to GP. Of continual interest is how to speed up the execution time of GP. Although many different implementations of GP have been created with the intention to make execution times faster, to the best of our knowledge, no complete specialized computer architecture has been created. Since GP inherently aims to be robust and configurable, it makes sense to employ reconfigurable computing systems. We believe that modern FPGA systems are up to the challenge.

 

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Students interested in participating should send an email to both me, Chris Crary (ccrary@ufl.edu), and Wes Piard (wespiard@ufl.edu). Such students should also attend our introductory information session, tentatively planned for Tuesday, August 24th, at 5:00PM. We expect to hold this information session both in-person and virtually, with the former being on campus and the latter being on Zoom––more details will be given to those who contact us. In the relevant email, please state whether or not you will be able to attend the information session as it is currently planned. We may change the date/time of the meeting, depending on the feedback we receive.

 

As mentioned above, participating students may be able to also enroll in research credits. Additionally, participating undergraduate students may be able to have their work double-count as a Design II project. Separately, note that any participating student may also have the opportunity to be a co-author of one of our upcoming publications, depending on the work contributed.

 

 

We hope to hear from you all soon.

 

Thank you for your time,

Chris”

 

 

 

 

Christopher Crary
PhD Student
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Florida
Email: ccrary@ufl.edu
Phone: (772) 475-5919