Prof. Keith Vanderlinde, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics
Niles Burbank, Machine Learning Solution Architect, AMD Professional Graphics Business Unit
Dr. Andrew Ling, Engineering Manager, Intel Programmable Solutions Group
Dr. Martin Snelgrove, CEO, Untether AI
Dr. Jongsok James Choi, CTO, LegUp Computing Inc.

"Digitally Mapping the Universe"
Prof. Keith Vanderlinde, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

Prof. Keith Vanderlinde is an experimental cosmologist based at the University of Toronto, where he studies the Large Scale Structure of the Universe and leads the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics' Long Wavelength Lab. Keith obtained his BSc from MIT, followed by a PhD from the University of Chicago. He spent a year in the Antarctic operating the South Pole Telescope, followed by postdoctoral research at McGill, before starting at Toronto in 2013. He is a leading figure in modern radio astronomical instrumentation, and part of the team behind CHIME, a massive new radio telescope in BC's Okanagan valley.

"GPUs as the Catalyst for Innovation in Artificial Intelligence"
Niles Burbank, Machine Learning Solution Architect, AMD Professional Graphics Business Unit

Niles Burbank works in the Professional Graphics business unit of AMDs Radeon Technologies Group. He holds the role of machine learning solution architect for Radeon Instinct, AMDs GPU product line for machine learning and high performance computing. He is based in AMDs Markham, Canada office

Prior to his current position, Niles served in a variety of product planning and product management roles at AMD. These involved a diverse set of products, including the FirePro S-series professional GPU product line, and APU and core logic products serving the notebook PC, desktop PC and server markets.

Before joining AMD in 2006, Niles spent eleven years at ATI Technologies in a variety of roles relating to ATIs GPU and chipset products. These products include ATIs first 3D accelerator, the 3D Rage, and all of ATs chipset products from the time ATI entered this market in 2002.

Niles holds a bachelors degree in engineering physics from the Royal Military College of Canada and a mastes degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto.

"Why FPGAs Are the Perfect Spatial Processor for Deep Learning Acceleration"
Dr. Andrew Ling, Engineering Manager, Intel Programmable Solutions Group (formerly Altera)

Andrew Ling is an engineering manager at Intel, focused on deep learning acceleration on FPGAs. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and research interests lie in CAD and HLS for FPGAs, and Acceleration.

"Near-Memory and In-Memory Inference"
Dr. Martin Snelgrove, CEO, Untether AI

Martin is a recovering academic. After teaching at the University of Toronto, doing sabbatical time at AT&T Bell Labs and then an Industrial Research Chair at Carleton University in Ottawa, he went on to Chief Scientist and CTO roles at two startups: Philsar and Soma Networks. He took Philsar to its sale to Conexant and SOMA to a system in multiple carrier trials and initial commercial deployments; then got asocial for a few years as a one-man-band consultancy; then got together with old friends to build a smart-analog design shop (Kapik); and now he is also turning seed funding into silicon for AI in Untether.

His academic work covered a range of circuit and signal processing technologies, including bandpass and complex sigma-delta data converters, active and digital filtering systems, and massively-parallel computing in smart memory. His industrial work is in the same areas, but without advisory committees.

"Accelerating Memcached with Cloud-Deployed FPGAs"
Dr. Jongsok James Choi, CTO, LegUp Computing Inc.

Jongsok (James) Choi is an expert in high-level synthesis and hardware/software co-design. He has been working with FPGAs over the last 9 years, where he has co-authored 15 top-tier conference/journal publications and a book chapter in the area of high-level synthesis, automatic System-on-Chip (SoC) design, and automatic synthesis of multi-threaded software to parallel hardware. He received his Ph.D degree in Computer Engineering in 2016 and his M.A.Sc. degree in 2012, both from the University of Toronto. Jongsok has previously worked at Intel, Qualcomm, Marvell Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics, and Blackberry.