C3SR teams won Double Championships at DAC System Design Contest 2019

For the second year in a row, our C3SR teams are victorious in a competition challenging experts worldwide to design low-power embedded systems for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. At the 2019 Design Automation Conference (DAC) System Design Contest, our teams won Double Championships for both the GPU and the FPGA tracks of the contest.

The contest’s objective is to create algorithms that can accurately detect and locate objects from images taken by aerial drones. Teams competed by building algorithms that could run on one of two low-power platforms: a GPU-based (Nvidia Jetson TX2) board and an FPGA-based (Xilinx Avnet Ultra96) board. Our first-place entries for both categories set a new record for accuracy.

A total of 110 teams registered for the System Design Contest, 52 focused on the GPU platform, with the 58 remaining teams competing on the FPGA platform. Our C3SR researchers formed two teams:

iSmart3-Skynet (GPU): Xiaofan Zhang, Haoming Lu, Jiachen Li, Cong Hao, Yuchen Fan, Yuhong Li, Sitao Huang, Bowen Cheng, Yunchao Wei, Thomas Huang, Jinjun Xiong, Honghui Shi, Wen-mei Hwu, and Deming Chen

iSmart3 (FPGA): Cong Hao, Xiaofan Zhang, Yuhong Li, Yao Chen, Xingheng Liu, Sitao Huang, Kyle Rupnow, Jinjun Xiong, Wen-mei Hwu, and Deming Chen, with Yao Chen as Prof. Deming Chen’s Ph.D. student at the Advanced Digital Sciences Center, and Dr. Kyle Rupnow as CTO of Inspirit IoT, a company co-founded by Prof. Deming Chen.

More details about this competition can be found in our blog.

Congratulations!