Heike Riel Abstract:
Historically, enhancing compute capability has meant integrating ever more and ever smaller devices into both, the memory and the processors. However, such scaling has become much more difficult recently because of physical scaling limits. Yet despite a lot of innovative technologies in materials, devices and architectures, the speed of increasing the density of transistors has slowed down. This raises the fundamental question of what is next?
With the explosion of available data, the internet-of-things and the increasing demand for machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence, the computational workloads are significantly changing. Therefore, there is a growing need for specialized hardware which can handle large computational workloads which take too long to run on conventional machines. In that regard completely new computing paradigms are developed such as quantum computing and non-von Neumann computing.
I will give an overview of our research activities in the field of extending the core technology roadmaps and in the new paradigms of cognitive hardware technologies and quantum computing.
Bio:
Dr. Heike Riel is IBM Fellow and Director of IoT Technology and Solutions at IBM Research. She is responsible for a research agenda, which aims to create scientific and technological breakthroughs to differentiate IBM’s IoT technology and solutions. This comprises the science and technology for cognitive analytics and IoT, end-to-end IoT applications as well as AI-based solutions for Industry 4.0.
She is a distinguished expert in nanotechnology and nanosciences and focuses her research on advancing the frontiers of information technology through the physical sciences. Her research has contributed to advancements in OLED display technology, molecular electronics and semiconductor nanoscale materials and devices. Her recent research interests include topological states of compound semiconductor nanowires for quantum information processing.
She earned a PhD in Physics from University of Bayreuth (Germany) in 2002 for her research on multilayer organic light-emitting devices for display applications performed at IBM Research – Zurich. From 2008 to 2015 she had been leading the Materials Integration and Nanoscale Devices group. In 2015 she joined the T.J. Watson Research Center to lead the Physical Sciences Department.
She has authored more than 130 peer reviewed publications and filed more than 50 patents. She has received several major awards, e.g. the Applied Physics Award of the Swiss Physical Society, the TR100, she is elected Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and of the Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences, and received an honorary doctor by Lund University. In 2017 she was awarded the APS David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics.