Experts Hail from IBM, Google, ETH Zurich, and Other Leading Organisations
EINDHOVEN, October 13, 2021 – Today, semiconductor start-up Axelera AI announced that Prof. Dr. Evangelos Eleftheriou has joined its executive team as Chief Technology Officer. Axelera AI also announced two new appointments to its cohort of scientific advisors, Prof. Dr. Marian Verhelst and Prof. Dr. Luca Benini. The CTO and new advisors will be supporting Axelera AI’s development of the next generation of AI hardware, launched last month with a successful $12 million seed round.
Before joining Axelera AI, Eleftheriou, an IEEE and IBM Fellow, has held various leadership positions at IBM Research. Among them, Eleftheriou has been the Department Head of Cloud and Computing Infrastructure as well as Leader of the Neuromorphic and In-memory Computing activities at IBM Research-Zurich. He brings to Axelera AI more than 35 years of research, leadership and industry experience. At Axelera AI, he will spearhead the development and dissemination of the company’s scalable AI hardware for applications at the edge. He joins a growing team in Zurich, with engineers and researchers hailing from Google, IBM Research and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), among others.
Prof. Dr. Benini is the current chair of Digital Circuits and Systems at D-ITET ETH Zurich and a full professor at the University of Bologna. His numerous accolades include an ERC-advanced grant, the 2016 IEEE CAS Mac Van Valkenburg Award, the 2019 IEEE TCAD Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award and the ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Award 2020. Axelera AI advisor Prof. Dr. Marian Verhelst is the Senior Scientific Director of IMEC and Professor at KU Leuven, where she specialises in digital and analogue accelerators. Dr. Verhelst founded KU Leuven’s research consortium on “context-aware ubiquitous computing (CubiqLab)” and has published numerous books, patents and journal contributions.
“Axelera AI’s game-changing technology will require input from the world’s most cutting-edge AI researchers and technologists,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and founder of Axelera AI. “We are excited to have Evangelos joining as our CTO and a diverse team of researchers and leaders serving as our scientific advisors.”
“I am honoured to be joining the executive team at Axelera AI,” remarked Evangelos Eleftheriou. “Axelera AI will be changing the AI industry with its new technological designs. I look forward to working closely with their leadership, board and advisors to achieve the company’s goals and introduce new AI solutions around the globe.”
Scientific advisor Prof. Dr. Luca Benini added, “Axelera AI is creating industry-defining technology to support innovation and expansion in AI capabilities. I am thrilled to join as a scientific advisor to make this possible.”
“Axelera AI’s scientific advisors will make recommendations based on our extensive experiences in edge computing, efficient processing platforms, neural networks and more,” agreed Prof. Dr. Marian Verhelst. “It is an honour to advise the company alongside other leaders building the future of AI.”
About Axelera AI
Axelera AI is designing the world’s most efficient and advanced solutions for AI at the edge. Its game-changing hardware and software product will concentrate the AI computational power of an entire server into a single chip at a fraction of the power consumption and price of AI hardware today. The company’s groundbreaking solution will empower thousands of applications of AI at the edge, making the use of AI more efficient and accessible than ever before. Axelera AI’s products will be fully integrated with the leading open-sourced AI frameworks when it launches to select customers and partners in 2022.
About Artificial Intelligence at The Edge
More than 125 billion “things” are expected to be connected to the internet by 2030 – including smartphones, cameras, smart city sensors, and more. Each of these “internet of things (IoT)” devices, even the most miniature sensor, creates an exponential amount of data for analysis. Currently, only 2% of that data has been analysed due to a lack of expertise and AI tools. Artificial intelligence allows us to analyse and understand this data thoroughly. However, the sheer amount of information and increasingly complex algorithms require a new generation of more powerful, efficient and accessible computation hardware. Due to growing privacy, security and bandwidth concerns, data is increasingly processed close to its origin, or “the edge.”
The AI hardware available today has been designed primarily for cloud computing operations, a sector with relatively limited cost, power, and scalability constraints. Computational hardware for edge applications needs an entirely new design that considers specific power needs, computational needs and economics. Axelera AI will capture this opportunity by developing and delivering a game-changing and scalable technology with superior performance and efficiency to accelerate AI applications at the edge.
