Joshi, Zhang named to MIT Technology Review's "Innovators Under 35" list

ECE assistant professors Gauri Joshi and Xu Zhang have been named to the MIT Technology Review's 2022 class of "Innovators Under 35" list, which recognizes the brightest young minds working to tackle today's biggest technology hurdles.

State-of-the-art machine-learning projects often require massive amounts of data and computational power. Consequently, only a few groups with these resources control access to many machine-learning models. Gauri Joshi, 34, is working to change that by designing distributed computing algorithms that make it possible for such models to be trained using a network of devices such as cell phones or sensors. "It democratized machine learning and makes it universally accessible without requiring expensive computing hardware and enormous amounts of training data," Joshi says. 

Moore's Law, which has powered the drive toward ever-smaller, more powerful computers, has led to the likes of AI, cloud computing, and autonomous driving. But the law is reaching its limits because the billions of devices squeezed onto a silicon chip can only get so small before the laws of physics intervene. Xu Zhang, 34, has approached the problem by developing a kind of two-dimensional semiconductor that's just atoms thick. "By transforming semiconductors from 3D to 2D, it is possible to truly push computing technologies to the ultimate atomic limit and enable a future of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence," Zhang says. Read more here.