CogArch 2021: 5th Workshop on Cognitive Architectures (Co-located with HPCA)

Website: www.corgarchworkshop.org

ABOUT

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques have become the de facto solution to drive human progress and more specifically, automation. In the last years, the world’s economy is gravitating towards such industry and the expectation of growth is not withering away. Additionally, these trends have been further exacerbated by the novel COVID-19 pandemic, which paralyzed the world’s economy and made evident the need for even more automation to provide safer and more reliable services and also to aid in the agile discovery of life-saving drugs and vaccines. To support those kinds of applications, cognitive architectures are designed and deployed to materialize advances in the aforementioned fields. However, although the newest cognitive designs are improving by the day, the amount of challenges ahead for cognitive systems is still overwhelming. With existing solutions reaching functional maturity, design considerations are now pivoting to new aspects like energy scaling, reliable operation, safety guarantees, or even security properties. This has led to a very diverse variety of hardware and software systems, either tailored to their specific applications or designed for general-purpose usage, which calls for a wider understanding of how cognitive architecture’s design should be tackled.

In that context, the CogArch workshop aims at bringing together the necessary know-how to design cognitive architectures from a holistic point of view, tackling all their design considerations from the algorithms to platforms in all the different fields that cognitive architectures will soon occupy, from autonomous cars to critical tasks in avionics or space or even personalized medicine.

The CogArch workshop already had four successful editions, bringing together experts and knowledge on the most novel design ideas for cognitive systems. This workshop capitalizes on synergizing industrial and academic effort in order to provide a better understanding of cognitive systems and key concepts of their design.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Hardware and software design considerations are gravitating towards AI applications, as those have been proven extremely useful in a wide variety of fields, from edge computing in autonomous cars to cloud-based computing for personalized medicine. The recent years have brought about a boom in start-ups and novel platforms that constantly offer improvements in performance and accuracy for the aforementioned applications. As this kind of cognitive architectures evolve, system designers have to incorporate many different considerations, and this has led to a very diverse field in terms of available solutions.

The CogArch workshop solicits formative ideas and new product offerings in this general space that cover all the design aspects of cognitive systems, from algorithms improving cognition to design methodologies that improve non-functional considerations like energy efficiency, security, agile design, programmability, or reliability.

Algorithms in support of cognitive reasoning: recognition, intelligent search, diagnosis, inference and informed decision-making.
Swarm intelligence and distributed architectural support; brain-inspired and neural computing architectures.
Agile design for cognitive systems.
Prototype demonstrations of state-of-the-art cognitive computing systems.
Accelerators and micro-architectural support for artificial intelligence.
Approaches to reduce training time and enable faster model delivery.
Cloud-backed autonomics and mobile cognition: architectural and OS support thereof.
Resilient design of distributed (swarm) mobile AI architectures.
Reliability and safety considerations, and security against adversarial attacks in mobile AI architectures.
Techniques for improving energy efficiency, battery life extension, and endurance in mobile AI architectures.
Case studies and real-life demonstrations/prototypes in specific application domains: e.g. smart homes, connected cars, and UAV-driven commercial services, architectures in support of AI for healthcare applications, such as medical imaging, drug discovery and smart diagnostics, as well as applications of interest to defense and homeland security.

CALL FOR PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS
CogArch will feature a session where researchers can showcase innovative prototype demonstrations or proof-of-concept designs in the cognitive architecture space. Examples of such demonstrations may include (but are not limited to):

Custom ASIC or FPGA-based demonstrations of machine learning, cognitive or neuromorphic architectures.
Innovative implementations of state-of-the-art cognitive algorithms/applications, and the underlying software-hardware co-design techniques.
Demonstration of end-to-end cognitive systems comprising of edge devices backed by a cloud computing infrastructure.
Novel designs showcasing the adoption of emerging technologies for the design of cognitive systems.
Tools or frameworks to aid analysis, simulation, and design of cognitive systems.
The workshop shall consist of regular presentations and/or prototype demonstrations by authors of selected submissions. In addition, it will include invited keynotes by eminent researchers from industry and academia as well as interactive panel discussions to kindle further interest in these research topics. Submissions will be reviewed by a workshop Program Committee, in addition to the organizers.

Submitted manuscripts must be in English of up to 2 pages (with same formatting guidelines as the main conference) indicating the type of submission: regular presentation or prototype demonstration. Submissions should be submitted to the this link by January 8th, 2021.

If you have questions regarding submission, please contact us: info@cogarchworkshop.org

ORGANIZERS
Roberto Gioiosa, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
David Trilla, IBM Research
Augusto Vega, IBM Research
Karthik Swaminathan, IBM Research
Alper Buyuktosunoglu, IBM Research
Pradip Bose, IBM Research

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission deadline: January 8th, 2021
Notification of acceptance: February 5th, 2021
Workshop date: February 28th, 2021 (Co-located with HPCA)

CogArch 2021 : Fifth Workshop on Cognitive Architectures (co-located with HPCA)