CALAS

Our paper entitled “Dynamic Sparse Training: Find Efficient Sparse Network From Scratch With Trainable Masked Layers” has been accepted in the 8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).

The 31st IEEE International Conference on *Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors* (ASAP 2020) will take place at The University of Manchester, UK, on July 6–8, 2020.   The conference will be held in cooperation with IEEE and IEEE Computer Society, and includes as organizers:General Chair- Dirk Koch, The University of Manchester, UKProgram Co-Chairs- Frank Hannig, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany- Javier Navaridas, The University of Manchester, UK. Dr. Ray will serve as one of the Program Committee (PC) member. For more information, please enter  https://asap2020.cs.manchester.ac.uk

We welcome Ms. Yuewantong Song (Sivy) to the CALAS research group. She received her B.Sc in Computer Science in software engineering of Zhengzhou University in 2019. She is currently a master student in Electronic Information Engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Dr. Ray C.C. CHEUNG. Her research interests include routing switching technology, network coding and FPGA system designs and developments.

Last week Dr. Ray Cheung visited South China University of Technology (Guangzhou) with Professor Hong Yan. Guangdong is setting up 10 national labs now including Pengchen. Each lab has funding in the scales of $2B RMB. Dr. Ray also visited CUHK (SZ) and Shenzhen Big Data Institute. This institute has recently received a funding of $750M RMB.

We welcome Ms. Jierui LIU (Jerry) to the CALAS research group. She has joined our team as an Undergraduate FYP student. Ms. Jerry is an undergraduate student at the Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong. She is the recipient of the CityU Mainland Full Tuition Scholarship. She has a great passion for FPGA technologies and is a member of the CALAS group. Her research interests include System design with FPGA and Natural Language Processing.

We welcome Mr. Fengzhi CAI (Fred) to the CALAS research group. He has joined our team as a Master’s degree candidate. Mr. CAI received his BEng in Electronic Information Science and Technology at the South China Normal University in 2019. He is currently a master student in Electronic Information Engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong and working under the supervision of Dr. Ray CHEUNG. His research interests include Network Coding and System Designing with FPGA.

CALAS got successfully funded $1.4M for the ITF project “Secure RISC-V processor for IoT devices”. Sengital Group HK- a market leader in IoT applications, is the industry partner of this project. We are actively looking for Postdoc, PhD candidate, Research Assistant for this project. Please send your CV and research profile to Dr Ray at cccheung@ieee.org.

https://www.itf.gov.hk

We arranged our final bi-weekly research meeting for the year 2019 on 23rd December, and CALAS member Junjie Liu (little Jack) presented his paper on “Dynamic Sparse Training” in this meeting. This paper got accepted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2020). This research presented a novel network pruning algorithm that can jointly find the optimal network parameters and sparse network structure in a unified optimization process with trainable pruning thresholds.

Paper link: https://openreview.net/forum?id=SJlbGJrtDB

Professor Raymond Yeung, Professor KH Lee and Dr Raymond Chan from the Chinese University of Hong Kong visited CALAS on December 18, 2019. They are part of a world-leading team in network coding, and Professor Raymond Yeung presented a lecture on “Wireless Multi-hop Network for Smart Lampposts.”