The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay is organising an Institute Colloquium on Tuesday, June 7, 2022. The details of the lecture are given below:

Title :   Energy-efficient information processing in our information-hungry world?

Speaker : Professor Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, Commonwealth Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University

Abstract: One of the most valuable resource for humankind is “information.” The amount of information that is sensed, produced, processed, stored, or communicated in our society every year is more than astronomical. Whether it is uploading one’s vacation photos on Meta, reaching out to a loved one in WhatsApp, forecasting tomorrow’s weather, decoding the human genome, or inciting a rebellion in Twitter, an enormous amount of information is processed annually, and the number of digital bits that are used up to encode that information would easily exceed the number of stars in the visible universe. Information, it turns out, is “physical,” and therefore, there is always some energy cost associated with every digital bit of information. The energy dissipated to perform 300 Google searches on a PC is more than enough to boil 1 liter of water at room temperature. Today, roughly 10% of the energy produced in the United States is consumed by its information processing infrastructure and the carbon footprint of a typical data center exceeds that of a nation like Malaysia. Even humans as computers are energy-hungry, and roughly 20% of the calories consumed by a human is used by the brain to “think.” It, therefore, behooves us to seek increasingly energy-efficient devices and hardware for information processing. This has impelled device physicists and engineers to seek out unusual approaches to manipulate digital bits of information with an eye to remaining as energy-frugal as possible. This talk will describe a new genre of classical information processing devices and unconventional architectures that are maximally energy-efficient to meet the information processing needs for the next two decades

About the speaker: Prof. Supriyo Bandyopadhyay is a Commonwealth Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University where he directs the Quantum Device Laboratory. Research in the laboratory has been frequently featured in national and international media (newspapers, internet blogs, magazines, journals such as Nature and Nanotechnology, CBS, NPR and internet news portals). The laboratory’s educational activities were featured in a pilot study conducted by the ASMEin Pennsylvania State University.

Prof. Bandyopadhyay is the winner of many awards. In 2016, he was named Virginia’s Outstanding Scientist by Virginia’s Governor Terence R. McAuliffeand in 2018, he received the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award from Governor Ralph Northam, the highest award given to a faculty member in the State of Virginia

In 2017 he won the University Award of Excellence given to a single faculty member annually in his University. He recently served as a Jefferson Science Fellow of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (2020-2021). In that role, he was a senior adviser to the Energy and Infrastructure Division of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau of Europe and Eurasia.

Prof. Bandyopadhyay has authored and co-authored over 400 research publications and presented over 150 invited talks and colloquia across four continents. He has also authored/co-authored three classic textbooks that have taught the field of spintronics and quantum device theory to students across the world. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Physical Society (APS), the British Institute of Physics (IoP), the Electrochemical Society (ECS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).