CARL 2015 Speaker: Kubilay Atasu, IBM Research-Zurich

(slides)

Text analytics is the process of extracting information from large-scale unstructured text data and has various applications in business analytics, healthcare, and security domains. The size of the data sets is constantly growing in these domains, and extracting, in real time and at high speeds, patterns, correlations, and insights hidden in these data sets has significant value. To address the associated performance and energy-efficiency challenges and to exploit the data-access bandwidth more efficiently, we use hardware accelerators realized on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). A key component of our approach is a compiler that automatically transforms high-level text analytics queries into FPGA-optimized data flow pipelines. Our accelerators execute complex rule-based text analytics queries, consisting of hundreds of text-processing functions, an order of magnitude faster than the multi-threaded software implementations running on powerful multi-core processors.

Kubilay Atasu is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research - Zurich. His research interests include design of hardware accelerators and use of hardware/software co-design and reconfigurable computing techniques to improve the computational efficiency, especially, of Big Data applications. Kubilay was the recipient of a best paper award at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 2003, and at the IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP) in 2008. He was a program co-chair of ASAP 2013 and the general chair of ASAP 2014. He has also served in the committees of DATE, FPL, and FPT conferences.