Abstract: Brain-computer interfaces will help us treat brain disorders, augment the healthy brain, and shed light on how the brain as an organ gives rise to the mind. Delivering on this promise requires the design of computer systems that delicately balance the tight power, latency, and bandwidth trade-offs needed to decode brain activity, stimulate biological neurons, and control assistive devices most effectively. This talk presents my group's design of a standardized and general computer architecture for future brain interfacing. Our design enables the treatment of several neurological disorders (most notably, epilepsy and movement disorders) and lays the groundwork for brain interfacing techniques that can help augment cognitive control and decision-making in the healthy brain. Central to our design is end-to-end hardware acceleration, from the microarchitectural to the distributed system level. The core research ideas are validated via detailed physical synthesis models and chip tape-outs in a 12nm CMOS process.
Bio: Abhishek Bhattacharjee is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. His group builds computer systems for high-performance data center servers and low-power computers for implantable brain computer interfaces. Abhishek's group's work has been shipped in billions of microprocessors and operating systems, for which he received the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award in 2023. His work has also received several Best Paper Awards and been selected for inclusion in IEEE Micro's Top Picks in Computer Architecture magazine several times. Abhishek teaches courses in computer architecture, operating systems, and compilers, and received the Yale Engineering Ackermann Award in 2022 in recognition of his teaching and mentorship.