ABSTRACT : With fast advancing technology and rapidly rising engineer salaries, we are living in arguably the golden age of computer science and engineering. At ECE Illinois, we have been observing several subtle but potentially important trends that may have major implications on the future of academic programs in computer science and engineering. Top recruiting companies are increasingly downplaying the importance of GPA while emphasizing project/research and team experiences of our undergraduate and Masters’ students when it comes to top job opportunities.  These companies are also increasingly skeptical about the value of incremental academic research in hot areas such as AI and IoT due to the lack of access to real-world data and massive computing resources. With these trends, academic undergraduate and graduates are faced with the challenge of remaining relevant and the possibility of navigating a fundamentally different academic landscape. In this talk, I will discuss promising strategic initiatives designed to (1) support our faculty and PhD students in conducting research that reshapes the technology landscape and (2) enable our bachelor’s and master’s students to graduate as world-class engineers and entrepreneurs.

BIO:  Wen-mei W. Hwu is a Professor and holds the Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also CTO of MulticoreWare Inc., chief scientist of UIUC Parallel Computing Institute and director of the IMPACT research group (www.crhc.uiuc.edu/Impact). He directs the UIUC CUDA Center of Excellence and serves as one of the principal investigators of the NSF Blue Waters leadership-class supercomputer. For his contributions, he received the ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the ISCA Influential Paper Award, the IEEE Computer Society B. R. Rau Award and the Distinguished Alumni Award in Computer Science of the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM. Dr. Hwu received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Hosted by Professor Jason Cong